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The day my whole title block vanished right before a deadline | Drafters - Free To Speak

The day my whole title block vanished right before a deadline

I was finishing a set of foundation plans for a big house in Boulder, working late in my home office. I hit save in AutoCAD, and the entire title block with all the client info and project stamps just disappeared, leaving a blank border. My heart dropped because the print was due in eight hours. I spent the next two hours digging through backup files and finally found a copy from that morning, then had to redo all the changes. Has anyone else had a title block just decide to quit on them like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

leehall6mo ago

Man, that exact thing happened to me on a school project in my final year. I was using an old version of Revit for a studio project and the entire sheet just went blank except for the viewport. I had to pull a three hour old backup from a thumb drive and redo all my sheet revisions and notes. It taught me to save incremental files like crazy now, something like "ProjectX_May7_430pm" before any big change. The panic is so real when the clock is ticking.

nelson.vera6mo ago

Okay but three hours of lost work? That seems like a huge overreaction to one bad save. Most programs auto-save every ten minutes anyway. Just hit save before you do something big, it's not that hard. Sounds like making a new file every half hour would cause more problems than it solves.

corap216mo ago

Honestly @leehall, I feel like saving that many versions would just make a huge mess on my drive. I just use the auto-save and keep one main file, it's never failed me.

keith_bennett4mo ago

Wait, @nelson.vera, have you actually had a title block vanish on you like that before? Because if not, I don't think you get the panic when the clock's ticking and your whole file's corrupted. I had the same thing happen with a floor plan for a client's basement remodel - one bad save and poof, half my annotations and the title block were just gone. I had to dig through a backup from yesterday and manually redo all the dimension changes I'd made that afternoon. It took me nearly four hours and I was sweating bullets the whole time. I get that you think saving every half hour sounds like a mess, but when you've lost a whole day's work once, you start doing whatever it takes to never feel that again.