Corrupt Drawing Recovery

What can be worse than forgetting to save your drawing? Saving your drawing and not being able to open it the next time that you try. Sometimes drawings can be corrupted such that AutoCAD is unable to open them. This paper will discuss some techniques that you can try to recover your drawing.

The most obvious thing to do when AutoCAD is unable to open a drawing is to run the RECOVER command on it. The RECOVER command is exactly like a File->Open, but the one big difference is that it will try to fix any problems that it finds in the drawing. AUDIT does the same, however the command is only available in a drawing that you already have opened. If it’s impossible to even open up the drawing, then you will not have the chance to run AUDIT on the drawing.

Sometimes, the RECOVER command will not work in the version of AutoCAD that you are currently in, but will work in a newer version of AutoCAD. If you are really stuck, try to find someone with a newer version of AutoCAD that would be able to try the recover command for you if you are not using the latest version.

So, the RECOVER command did not work. What else can you try to restore you drawing? One option is to insert the drawing as a block into a new, blank drawing. Using the INSERT command, browse for the drawing that you are unable to open and insert it into the drawing at 0,0,0 with a rotation of 0 degrees, and without scaling it. Make sure to watch out for Automatic Scaling if you’re using AutoCAD version 2006 or newer. If this works, you can then explode the block and continue working on your drawing.

Sometimes partially opening a drawing can help to remove information from layers in the drawing that you are unable to open. Information on partially opening files is located here.

If neither of the before mentioned methods worked either and you have Map 3D, Land Desktop, or Civil 3D installed, then you can run a map query to try to extract the information out of the drawing. Information on this process can be located here.

If none of these methods worked so far then it might be possible to recover an older version of the file. Please read the other white paper on drawing crash recovery here.

If none of these methods worked, then hopefully you have a good back up system in place that archives your files every night. Talk to the IT department of your company to check and see if there is such a system in place. If there is no such system in place, then maybe a new backup system is needed.