We’ve all done it – either permanently erased a drawing we were working on or worse – saved over a drawing we wanted to keep. How to get the drawing back? Restore the backup you made of the drawing. No, I’m not being sarcastic here – every night you should copy the drawing to a tape drive, cd or a server location so you have a copy to restore if necessary.
If you don’t have that, you can try to restore the automatic copy AutoCAD makes. But first you have to find it. It is stored in a location that is specified in your AutoCAD OPTIONS dialog:
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1. Open up OPTIONS and pick the File tab. Navigate down to Automatic Save File Location and pick the + there. This lists the folder in which your automatically saved files go. Note that it uses the old DOS scrunchy abbreviations for the folder names.
2. Open Explorer (or whatever you use to navigate through your files) and located the folder specified in the above location.
3. Find your drawing. Note that it will be your original drawing name followed by the extension .sv$ instead of .dwg. Rename the drawing to something entirely new and change the extension to be .dwg. Copy this newly named file to your usual drawing file folder and open it up to see if it is what you expect.
You can also try the AutoCAD DRAWINGRECOVERY command. It will locate most of these backup files for you.
PS – AutoCAD also saves temporary files in case you crash in the middle of a drawing session, but these get erased as soon as you successfully open AutoCAD the next time, so they are pretty useless as far as this goes.
The H-Factor 
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