How to recover a file after a SW crash?

Your file is gone and there's nothing you can do to restore it.

SolidWorks has a very weak auto recovery system and most of us have experienced it,

But Solidworks doesn't bother to improve its auto recovery system.

Read this post and you can judge for yourself.

Autorecover is useless - please discuss

As in past years "Save Often"

hei'ya Michael,

in essence the previous replies are of course correct

but lets try to bring a ray of sunshine (possibley)

to this little grey cloud- presuming a Windows grey cloud

(Apple users don't keep their OS secret)

I am guessing you are on a single

laptop/desktop and not networked

hopefully you can say yes to the following conditions

1- did you ever save the model at all- if not that's it

2- do you have 10% free disk space -

    where you stored your SW model

3- do you have system restore "Protection-On" active for

    this drive- check "System Properties">"System Protection"

4- Navigate to your SW model folder>

    and right click in empty space of the folder>

    select "Properties">"Previous Versions"

    and then you will see Previous Versions listed

    if they exist- I advise to copy out to a new location/folder

5- last ditch- use one of the recovery programs such as "Recuva"

    or a "Shadow" recovery program -

   hope this helps have a good'n kelef

Hi Michael,

In the event of a crash, I always go and check my SW temp directory manually to see if it wrote a .swar file. I do this because SW doesn't alway prompt for recovery files from this location. It should be it doesn't always...

You can check what SW is writing automatically to this directory the directory is found at:

C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\TempSWBackupDirectory\swxauto

It's also help fully to often refer to this directory with the Windows Explorer so that you can (in details view) see the time and date that it was written verse the last time you save the default file.

Mark

This isn't the solution for everyone - but I've got all my files saved to DropBox with a Pro account. For any file in DB you can recover previously saved versions from the web interface ( i think this is only with the Pro or business accounts). I also have another computer linked to Dropbox which is always saving version backups as well.

All that said, there have been instances in the past when the auto-recover SW feature has saved me where none of the other things have helped.

Send it to your VAR. Sometimes they can recover it for you.

There's one more possibility that I don't think anyone mentioned.  Check your SW backups (see just above the highlighted portion in the screenshot from Christopher Estelow's response).  There may be a recent backup there that you can open and save.

Solidworks 2017 have a option called SW Recover.

Go to your folder, there should be a backup of your file.

This has helped me before

Go to System options -> Backup/Recover

Here you can setup a "Autosave" function.

Hope it helps!