Expert Training

As with all computer documents that you work on, get in the habit of saving your current AutoCAD drawing regularly. I recommend every 10 minutes or so. Although AutoCAD’s automatic drawing save feature is useful as a secondary backup save, you shouldn’t rely on it exclusively. (AutoCAD creates automatic save files with inscrutable names like Drawing1_1_1_1478.bak and puts them in the folder specified by the Automatic Save File Location setting on the File tab of the Options dialog box.) Save your drawing and save yourself the pain of lost work and the hassle of trying to locate the right automatic save file.
Backing up your data is prudent advice for any important work that you do on a computer, but it’s doubly prudent for CAD drawings. A set of CAD drawings is a lot harder and more time-consuming to re-create than most other computer documents. Unless you’re willing to lose more than a day’s worth of work, develop a plan of daily backups onto tape, CD-RW (CD ReWritable) discs, or another high-capacity medium.
Warning Don’t be lulled into complacency by the increasing reliability of hard disks. Although hard disk failure is increasingly rare, it still happens, and if it happens to you sans backup, you’ll quickly understand the full force of the phrase “catastrophic failure.” Also, backups aren’t just protection against disk failure. Most of the time, backups help you recover from “pilot error” — accidentally erasing a file, messing up a drawing with ill-advised editing, and so on. Even if you’re conscientious and never make mistakes, there’s a good chance that someone else in your office who has access to your DWG files hasn’t quite achieved your exalted level of perfection. Protect your work and minimize recriminations with regular backups.