Autodesk has made great strides over the past few releases in the recovering and auditing of drawing files in AutoCAD, but we are looking for more research test cases. With more non-Autodesk DWG writing applications using reverse engineered libraries to write DWG files it has resulted in more problem drawings for our customers. There are also many other potential causes of these problem drawings such as network issues, hardware issues, customization, as well as editing and saving software applications defects.
We are looking for problem drawings that cannot be recovered in AutoCAD 2005/2006. We are looking to research these drawings to have test cases and incorporate the cases into the AutoCAD recovery and audit functions. There are some complicated methods employed in repairing a problem drawing. One method is to compare the data structure to known valid types and then if something is incorrect have some potential repair methods to repair the problem. The problem is when a data type or the file structure is missing data or is not correctly formatted. There is no automatic magic to reconstruct bad data. When we recover or repair data one of our requirements is the data and file integrity. It would not be good to just recover bad data as that could lead to other problems including drawing accuracy and stability. If we receive test case drawings we can build the types of found problems into AutoCAD recover cases to repair similar issues.
Please Zip the drawing file and email it to me with the subject line of "Problem Drawing". Please detail any known information on the drawing file such as last operations, application that saved it or edited it, and any other known history on the file.
Some recovery resources:
* Autodesk support document "Recover damaged drawing files"
* Great article from CVIS on prevention and recovery of AutoCAD data "After the Crash"
Shaan
[email protected]
