Inventor Project Settings and a Cautionary Tale

Most of these blog posts are inspired by something cool, or important, that I encounter when working on a project, teaching a class, or handling a support case.  This time it involves a cautionary tale and an Inventor Project setting, that you may not know about.

The Cautionary Tale

I just arrived on-site, for the second day of a two day project.  I was under a time crunch, so I wanted to get to work right away.  I fired up Inventor and got to work on finishing up the model, before I got to the 2D drawings.  I had just made a few tweaks to the model and I realized that I was in Inventor 2020, when the customer is still using Inventor 2019.  OH NO!!!  All my work was saved on a portable hard-drive, and I hadn't created a second copy as a backup, which is my habit.

So there I was, the only copy had been migrated, I didn't have a backup, I didn't have time to redo everything in Inventor 2019 and the customer had no interest in transitioning to Inventor 2020.  After considering what my options were, I had a moment of inspiration.  Inventor keeps a certain number of previously saved version of the file in the Old Versions folder.  If you have been using Inventor for a while, you probably are very familiar with the Old Versions folder, and perhaps even recovered a file from that folder.  My only hope was if I had files from Inventor 2019 in that folder I could restore.  I looked at my project settings and found that the setting for "Old Versions To Keep On Save" was set to 1, which is the default value.  So my only hope was to restore all of those files and hope that they were all Inventor 2019 versions.

As it turns out, I had saved some of the files twice in Inventor 2020, so the Old Versions folder contained a 2020 version of those files.  So even though the right fix would be to go back and recreate the files that were migrated, I didn't have the time to do this.  I had to leave the project with certain files being migrated, and some still in the correct version.  One software enhancement that enabled me to move forward with a project half migrated is the AnyCAD for Inventor.  In the Inventor 2018.3 Update, Autodesk introduced AnyCAD support for "future" Inventor formats.  Meaning that you can open Inventor 2020 files in Inventor 2019.  Since it cannot open the file directly, Inventor creates a generic assembly and places the newer file formatted part or assemblies into that assembly.

In the end, I was able to get the model done and create the 2D drawings that the customer needed to send to a fabricator.  However, this assembly was in this weird state of being caught between 2019 and 2020.  Since this experience, the customer has migrated up to 2020.

What Did I Learn?

Based on this experience, I would say that the default value for "Old Versions To Keep On Save" is not enough to cover the average user.  You are probably thinking, "I should be okay because my IT department backups our CAD data."  Which is true, and you are right.  However, I have had to rely on IT to restore a corrupted file in the past.  It was a time consuming process for them to search though the backups and find the necessary file.  So keeping up to 5 old versions should shorten the time for restoring a file that needs to be recovered, or reverted.  I would just advise you to find a quantity that is helpful, without bloating your storage.  For me, I get "save happy" so I know that keeping two versions would probably not be helpful.  That is why I think three to five would be a good number for me.

It is also worth pointing out that if you are using Inventor and the Vault, you have another layer of protection because Vault manages file versions for you. Where the Old Versions folder houses previously save versions, Vault will retain a version of the file each time the file is checked into the Vault.

How To Restore an Old Version

If you do implement this suggestion and find yourself in the situation where you need to restore a previously saved version, how do you go about doing that?  The first step is to start the Open File dialog box, there you can navigate to where the file is saved.  In that directory, you should find the "Old Versions" folder.  Then you find the version you want to open, and click open.  At that point Inventor will ask if you want to restore that version to the current version, open a read-only version of the file, or open the current version of that file.  

This is an example of what the Old Versions folder will look like.

This is an example of the dialog that you will see when you try to open an Old Version.

My typical process is that I open a read-only version to verify that I have the desired version.  If it is the correct version, I will then repeat the process to restore the file.

Here is a video shows how to restore files.

Having used the Vault that handles the file versioning automatically, I have grown to appreciate that function and I do miss it on projects that don't use the Vault.  I have begun setting certain projects to keep 5 previously saved versions because most of my projects are smaller in scope.  Another benefit to this, even if you don't have poorly timed migrations, or corrupt file issues, is that this gives you milestones that you could revert to if necessary.  I can say that this setting didn't mean much to me, until the day it was my only hope of reverting a model that I didn't intent on migrating.  Then that experience changed how important that setting was to me, hopefully, this knowledge will prevent you from making a similar mistake.