What is the point of a .bak?
Personally, I don't trust the Autosaves. I've had too many times when I've gone to get the Autosave, only to find it's been deleted already.
It occurred to me that this doesn't answer the question. If the Autosave gets lost, then there is usually still the .DWG file, which is newer than the .BAK file. So, even if the Autosave file gets lost, the .BAK still usually isn't useful (unless the .DWG got corrupted somehow).
So, I started trying to remember why I've used .BAK files in the past. It seems it's always because of one of two reasons:
- The .DWG file got corrupted somehow, but the .BAK file is still good.
- I edit a file and want to discard the changes, but accidentally answer "Yes" to the "Overwrite file?" prompt.
Of these two, the first happens very rarely. The second happens occasionally. They both happen often enough that I wouldn't want to disable the .BAK file generation, but they both happen rarely enough that the .BAK file location is not very important. Plus, since we've opened a satellite office, we've regularly been transfering projects between offices. Transfering BAK files slows down the process, and manually deleting BAK files all the time is annoying. So, I'm thinking we'll start putting BAK files somewhere else.
I tried out the MOVEBAK routine, and it works as advertised, but I get weird error messages on every save. Well, error messages might not be right - it's more like random text. In other words, I run the QSAVE command, and the save happens, but then some apparently-random text is printed to the command window. At first, the text was "Unable to transmit selected drawing file.", which made me think it was a valid error message. But then the text changed to "Midpoint" for some unknown reason, and now I get "Midpoint" echoed to the command window after every save. It doesn't seem to affect anything, and everything works OK. It's just strange...
(I just killed and restarted Autocad, and now it's back to echoing "Unable to transmit selected drawing file" after every save.)