So, I’m well into my first project in Rhino and the unthinkable has happened. The USB flash disk that all my files are saved on has died.
“No problem” I thought, I knew that Autosave was active. Every 20 minutes in C:\Users…\Appdata\Roaming\McNeel\Rhino\5.0…
Except the most recent file there is from 2 weeks ago. How is this possible if it’s set up to save every 20 minutes?
So now I’ve used some recovery software to try and retrieve the latest files off the flash drive. The file itself is corrupt and the backup that’s saved along with the actual file isn’t even recognized as a Rhino file anymore. I used the “Rescue3DMfile” command which sort of worked. It recovered a good portion of the file but all the objects are on the same layer. It will probably take me as long to separate everything out as it will to remake everything.
As it stands now my deadline is in 2 weeks and the most recent file I can use is 2 weeks old.
Any suggestions?
When Rhino shuts down normally (i.e. without crashing), the autosave file is deleted. It’s a safeguard against malfunctioning of Rhino only, not the rest of the system.
Sadly none for this project.
As for the future, do an incremental save once in a while and move the older versions to a safe location.
Most people do not understand the function of Autosave. Autosave is there to prevent massive data loss from a crash while you are working on a file. Once you save and close your file, it is assumes that you do not need the Autosave file and it is deleted. So recovering your data from an autosave file when the file has been closed and saved on a drive that has died is not possible.
Now, Rhino by default also creates a .bak file by default in the same directory as the file itself. The .bak file represents the next to last saved file… Unfortunately, if it’s on the same drive that has died, that probably won’t help much.
If you don’t want to risk losing your work, here are a couple of rules:
Don’t save valuable files in a USB drive. They are notorious for dying and getting corrupted.
Save your valuable files in more than one place - if one drive dies, you have another copy somewhere.
Keep off-site backups (theft, fire, etc.)
Use some sort of cloud backup service like Dropbox to make sure your files are stored somewhere else besides your computer, if you have more than one computer synchronized, you will have not only several local copies, but also the one in the cloud, which also may have versioning.
Good grief. I would NEVER only save files to a flash drive if I didn’t think they were being backed up on the pc too.
I did manage to recover the .bak file off the flash. But, ofcourse, that and its corresponding 3dm file are the only two that don’t work anymore.
All the others work just fine but they’re weeks old.
That’s quite a kick in the gentleman’s area.
So there’s no way to recover the autosaves once Rhino deletes them? (The autosaves were on the pc’s hard drive, not the flash that’s dead)
There is software around that can recover files from a harddrive as well. A regular delete in Windows deletes the reference to data, but not the actual data untill that part of the hdd is overwritten. Maybe that is an option.