I am at a loss for one of my designs just up and disappearing on me. I wonder if anyone has had a similar situation happen to them?
Let me explain. I designed this project I had been working on for many days. I worked on it off and on for weeks. I saved the file often and thought I had it all finalized in my design. I saved the final results as well. I finally got back to my machine after being gone for 3 weeks for work. I went to my shop and plugged in to run the new design to work out little flaws in my design. Carbide Motion had the program in and ran it just fine. I stopped the program half way thru because I realized that the design was off and needed more tweaking.
I had a second design that I also created and want to test that design as well. I changed programs and ran this program completely thru the machine. I didn’t like all of the results, but I was close to where I wanted it to be. I shutdown my machine and brought my laptop home to work on the designs some more.
I worked on the second design first and finalized it to my liking. Then I brought up the first design. To my dismay, the design was completely gone. What was left of the design was a blank page with all of my setup parameters completely changed. The material size was reduced to less then 1" in both directions, which was set to 3" x 4". The material thickness was completely on zero. The toolpath zero was in a completely different location then what I set mine to. And the retract height was on zero.
I set my setting of material for 3"x4", with a thickness of .75", my x and y zero set to top left corner, and retract height to .200". I didnt change anything with this design after running it in CM. I just stopped the program and imported the other program to test that run. I have now a file name, but now design anymore. I saved often during designing and the file was there when I ran it. Now, after going back into it to make some changes, the design is completely gone. I didnt have a program crash. I didnt save the programs to a flash drive just yet. Now with this happening, I backed up all of my design files on flash drive. Makes me want to back up the designs even more on a couple flash drives.
Has anyone had this kind of an issue before with a design just up and disappearing on you with zero clues as to what happened to it? It sickens me to think how many hours I had in creating this design and then see it completely gone. I slowly worked on this design, and started it back in November of 2023 right around the time I got my new machine.
This is the file now. You can see in the setup of the material all of the changes there are to what I originally had. My CC Pro version is Build 757. CM is 618. I dont have any backups of the older version unless they are in my designed files only.
The file names and file paths are not strange or weird characters. I have two separate file locations. One of the file groups are for files in the design stages, and the other file group is for finished files. This way I know which ones I have completed, and which ones are still in creation mode.
This is the other file I was working on the same day. I ran this one after the Thor hammer file. I had the Thor Hammer file in the other file location for a month now, and just pulled it up, loaded it into CM and ran it. Then switched files the the Gemini file and ran it. Came back and the Thor Hammer file was changed.
The Gemini file on your screenshot looks off on some of the design. I had everything in place and now the border around the names are off. I don’t know how I would have saved the Thor Hammer file as an .nc file. I didnt save anything on this file unless I screwed up sometime back and didnt realize it. Could I have saved that file weeks back as an .nc file and it just finally changed on me somehow?
I looked into the previous version restore, and the computer says there are no previous versions of this file to restore. So, I am out of luck on this file. Maybe one day I will have this all figured out and will stop losing files and wasting time designing twice or more times.
The big thing which helps me on complicated projects is that next to a given file there is always a “backups” folder, and as I’m working, when I make a major change to a file, I will re-save it w/ a filename which reflects that change, then I’ll rename the previous version with a descriptive name and put the older file into the “backups” folder.
If there’s ever a problem with a file, or I change my mind, I open up the “backups” folder, sort it by date, read through the descriptive filenames, and copy out (not move) the one I want to work with.
Makes sense to make backups just in case changes are made that are not desired. I didnt back any of these files up with backups. I will start doing so from now on. But I still dont understand how that file got saved from a .c2d to an .nc file. I dont even see where the screenshot file you sent me has it changed to an .nc file.
Makes me start to feel like an idiot when it comes to these files. I save them and try to do everything possible to make sure the file names are set in proper fonts and no characters that could corrupt the files. Just sometimes this stuff gets way out there and cant seem to wrangle in some of the concepts as to what and why something did this or that.
Im also sick to my stomach just thinking of having to create this hammer design again. I struggled with all of the changes I had to tweak and remove to make it work. It was a slow working progress design. Now I lost it all and dont understand how. But its my own fault for not having file backups and backups of my backups. I guess I just trust computers too much these days and I am learning the hard way on why I should trust these damn things so much.
Why is the green line around the name Drex and Gemini on your screenshot all over the letters? I put those lines in around that stuff to allow me to put in texture in all of that open space, and in your screenshot file, the lines are off. In my file they are where they belong.
Yes, sometimes learning things the hard way helps to form habits into protecting files and such in the future. I have flash drives ready for anything I save. I learn to make changes and save, but now I will make changes and rename the files from now on as well. Might be best to help keep the files in order by making their own file and saving changes in that file under different file names so I have reference files to fall back on if things mess up.
I am a bit glad to know that I am not the only one who has had the issue of losing files as well. It just isnt a good feeling to lose them. Again, I will not stop creating and I learn as I go.
