SOLIDWORKS Auto-recovery and Back up

SOLIDWORKS has two different methods to help you recover from an unexpected crash or loss of data which are Auto-recovery and Back-up settings.

These can be found within options  or Tools > Options and select Backup/Recover:

Auto-recovery

If ‘Save auto-recover information’ is selected and set to a value of 1 or greater when you restart SOLIDWORKS after an unexpected crash, any documents that had been active for more than the Auto-recovery interval should appear in the SOLIDWORKS Document Recovery Tab within the task pane which you can then save to replace the original file to create a new file.

When ‘Auto recovery’ turned on, then as you work on a SOLIDWORKS file, temporary files are created in the specified file location (\swxauto). These files are deleted when the original file is saved and closed normally, but the temp files will remain in the folder if the software did not close down normally and you will likely be prompted if you want to “open the backup versions” to recover the temporary files.

In the case that you don’t get the any recovered files upon restarting SOLIDWORKS then it is worth navigating to the ‘Auto recover folder’ through Windows Explorer, you should see a file with an .SWAR extension as shown:

The auto-recovered file will be name with a prefix ‘AutoRecover of’, the SOLIDWORKS file name and then the file extension ‘.swar’.

For Example: Propeller.SLDPRT is saved as: AutoRecover Of Propeller.SLDPRT.swar

You can recover a copy of your original file at last change saved state based on the number of minutes set in the Backup/recover options, if you edit the name and extension of the file, removing the AutoRecover prefix, as well as replacing the .swar extension with the correct part, assembly or drawing file.

Back up

Backup feature save a backup copy of your original document every time any changes are saved to the original file, i.e. every time you click (File > Save or CTRL+S). It is one version before the last saved version of the document. This provides a series of progressing revisions, which means that if you accidentally save a file but then wish to undo some changes, you can recover the previous version.

If you set the “Number of backup copies per document” to 1 or greater, then every time you save a document in SOLIDWORKS, a new version of the file, up to the number specified, is created and after that the first backup version is overwritten.

The backup copies are either stored in the same folder as the original files, or you can specify a backup folder on a local drive.