Recovery

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

Some of you may recall that I recently suffered a disk crash, which almost lost me all my AR efforts over the last few years. Fortunately, David pointed me in the direction of the Autosave folder, which allowed me to recover my most ecent work, and some of my older efforts. There's probably more lurking in there, but I have all I really need for now.

Another thing that I thought I had lost was all the User Objects that I had created for myself, mostly of Metcalfe N Kits. I had spent many hours on these, printing up the footprint diagrams downloaded from Metcalfe's website and then transcribing them into AR. Then I thought, "Hang on, I've recovered my layout plan, and it still shows all my buildings; can I do something with that?" The straight answer is yes!

I simply selected the building and clicked on "Modify object". You do actually have to change something for this to work, or at least make AR THINK you have. In my case, I simply Ungrouped the object and immediately re-Grouped it. Then I was able to re-save it, and my version is back in the User Objects Library.

I re-formatted the corrupted drive (the hub I had it on was the culprit, and has been binned and replaced), and it appears to be fine. I'm not taking any chances, though; all my AR stuff is now on my internal HDD, and I'm only using the external one for stuff that's not really important, until I'm sure it's working reliably.

Hope this ramble helps someone in the future!

Nick

[The Track Planner]

Hi Nick,

Great to hear you got back some of your objects.

Suggestion... I have over ten years of personal user objects (well over 500 of them). Obviously, it would be a disaster if I lost them. To prevent this, about every two weeks I back up the sub directory [on my C: drive] that contains all of the object folders and files that AR creates. Plus I keep two backups in separate places, so I've always got the latest objects files [at least within two weeks] available to me.

Secondly, I would strongly recommend you use either an external drive [preferably a high quality SSD drive] or a cloud service as an additional backup safe guard.

Bill - The Track Planner

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

A follow-up on the above, and a request.

I again had drive problems, and lost some work, but I was able to recover the most recent files from the Autosave folder. I did, somehow, lose some of my objects, but, as they were all in use in plans, I was able to recover them. My request is:

When modifying an object, would it be possible to leave the existing details in place, rather than have to re-type them? All the info is there, and I'm not going to change anything.

Cheers,

Nick

[David]

@Nick: the technical problem now is that the modify function simply ungroups the elements the object consists of, so it's not much more than just a collection of lines and surfaces.

There is no easy way to keep the object details when the object is gone.

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

Hi David, thanks for that response.

As an alternative, could there be a button for "Save as", somehow? I have created a "new" manufacturer called "Metcalfe by Nick", which contains my efforts in that area. When retrieving them from old plans, where they were simply defined as "Metcalfe", it would be good if I could simply edit that line and save.

Cheers,

Nick