Subtitles of the Movie

We now have a lot of information in our drawing, we have in our Model tab our view of our office along with our blocks, our Layers, things like our desks, our chairs, our little telephones there as well. We also have some attributes in there such as the Room Name Attribute there. So there's lots of information in the Model tab. In the A3 Landscape Layout tab as well we have Viewports that are locked and fixed. We have our TITLEBLOCK which is ready to be issued now with regard to our particular project, so we have a lot of information in there that needs to be retained. So what we have to do is we have to save our drawing. Now the most common way of saving your drawing is to go up here to the little Floppy Disk Icon, this is called a Quick Save and it saves all of the current changes in that particular file. Be careful though, because if you're using an existing drawing what you do need to do is go to the Menu Browser and do a File Save As, like so. You don't want to save your existing drawing with the new changes; you want to save it as a New File. So you'd put a New File Name in here, for example. So Quick Save saves the current drawing with the current changes and File and Save As, saves it as a New File Name in the folder where your existing drawings are. Now also whilst you're working you can set AutoCAD to Auto-Save. So without any command selected, its just a right click on the mouse and down to the Options, option if you'll pardon the pun and this brings up the Options dialog box, we looked at this in previous exercises. We need to go to the Open and Save tab here, which is the tab that we looked at previously when we were looking at saving files as different file types. But if we look below the File Save here and look at file safety precautions we can set an Automatic Save. By default its ten minutes between each save there as you can see, now that is very important because every ten minutes AutoCAD will Auto-Save to a specific location for you. It will also create a back-up copy by default with each save which is actually a dot BAK file instead of a dot DWG file. That BAK file can be renamed as a dot DWG is your original DWG becomes corrupt in anyway, perhaps due to copying or something along those lines. Also as well if you use digital signature which you can see at the bottom there, it's ticked, you can display digital signature information. Remember as well older versions of AutoCAD the automatic save was actually 120 minutes between each save by default, that's two hours. You can do a lot of work in 2 hours and at the 119 minute your computer could crash before it does an Auto-Save, that's a lot of work to lose, been there, done that and got the t-shirt unfortunately. So ten minutes is a good number to have between saves. So leave those settings as they are and click on OK. Now that's all well and good but where does that automatic save go? Does it go to your file here where you do a File Save As for example? Well no, you might not want it to go there because your File Save As might save to your C drive on your computer. If your hard drive, your C Drive on your computer decides to crash on you or perhaps go corrupt on you and needs to be rebuilt your drawings are going to be lost. So if your working in a network environment where you've got server that you can save drawings to, my suggestion is to go into your Options, so that's a right click on Options again and in your Files Tab here you have an Automatic Save File Location. Now mine is going to my C Drive which is very bad CAD practice but then again I'm not on a network. So I can't really save to a network when I'm working from where I am now. However you can quite happily browse here to a network drive and find a location that you're going to work with and then tell AutoCAD to automatically save the files there. So there'll be an Automatic Save of a DWG and a BAK file to that network location. So if your computer does die on you, you can immediately pick up your drawings from another computer using the network save files. It's a good habit to get into, a good CAD Management practice.