How to protect yourself against software crashes

We’ve all been there - you’ve spent three hours on the most complex part of your project, painstakingly detailing the paving around the back door or getting the mix of planting jussssst right and then it happens - the spinning beachball of doom starts up and won’t stop, or you’re dumped into what’s known in IT as the “Blue Screen of Death” and all your work is gone in a cloud of pixel smoke.

There are a few things we can do to prevent these from happening, but top of the list is making sure that your software is set up to autosave your work. In this article we’ll look at how to do this for SketchUp, Vectorworks and Photoshop. We’ll also tell you how to find the back up file once it’s been created.

The first step is always to save your file as soon as your open it. I could write a whole ‘nother article on saving and filename conventions but will save that for another time! But just make sure you’ve saved that file before you do any work on it - all autosave functionality requires a file to be created in the first place.

SketchUp

Go to the SketchUp menu > Settings (on a PC this is under the Windows menu) and you’ll see a dialog box similar to the one to the right. Select the General tab and make sure that Create Backup is ticked, and that Auto-save is also ticked. The amount of time you choose is up to you. If you work with enormous files that take ages to save you may want to set the time to fifteen minutes as the saving process could disrupt your workflow.

SketchUp automatically saves the backups to the same folder as your working file. These are called filename.skb (instead of filename.skp) and they also have a tilde (~) in the file name. Double clicking one of these back ups should automatically open it in SketchUp.

VECTORWORKS

In Vectorworks, go to the Vectorworks menu > Preferences (again, on a PC this is under the Windows menu). Select the Autosave tab and ensure that Autosave every X minutes is ticked. It’s up to you whether your backup overwrites the previous one or whether it creates a new file. I tend to create a new file, and at the end of the project delete the backups so they’re not taking up valuable hard drive space.

The backup files are saved in a folder (again, in the location of your working file) called VW Backup. You’ll be able to click on these and they’ll open in Vectorworks, but don’t forget to save them to a new folder, otherwise you’ll end up with backups of backups and very long file names!

PHOTOSHOP

Photoshop’s the easiest of the lot - the option shown on the right is on by default. You can confirm this by going to Photoshop > Settings > File Handling (again on the Windows menu on a PC) and making sure it’s on.

When Photoshop crashes these files are automatically recovered when you open the software again, making it a very seamless experience.