Vectric Customer

Now that a new release of the Vectric software is out this is a good time to remind people of some of the features in VCarve and Aspire, and also in Windows.

Save Early Save Often
As you are working on your project it is a good idea to save your work as you go. Vectric gives you several choices:
<Ctrl S> or File/Save - This saves your work over the last saved version of the file. Teach yourself to type <Ctrl S> whenever you have made a major change and are satisfied with the results. I've trained myself to hit <Ctrl S> whenever I stop to think for a bit.If you are not sure of your changes then use the File ⇒ Save As... command instead option and give the file a new name.

<Ctrl Alt S> or File/Increment and Save - This is cooler and easier than File/Save As. The Increment and save operation allows you to automatically number iterations of files you are working on. If you select this operation when editing a file which ends with an underscore, or a hyphen followed by a number, then the number will be increased by 1 and the file will be saved using this number.

For example, MyFile_1.crv3d becomes MyFile_2.crv3d MyFile-1.crv3d becomes MyFile-2.crv3d
The increment and save option will keep incrementing until it finds a file that does not currently exist. It will not overwrite an existing file.

Later, if you wish, you can go back and delete the older versions.

Backup Is Cheap and Oh So Easy
You can purchase a 4TB external hard drive today for about $100 from any number of sources. I saw a special on eBay today (2017-07-26) for a new 4TB Seagate drive for $89.

Windows 10 makes it very easy to have backups happen automatically. Here is a link to instructions on How to Back Up Your Computer Automatically with Windows 10's Built-in Tools

I use the File History feature to backup my files and folders that change frequently. I have mine set to daily backups but you have have them happen as often as every 10 minutes. It will keep backups for a specified period of time or "Until Space is Needed".

....But if you don't Save Early and Save Often then the backup can't help you out....

If you are doing this for a living then an offsite backup will protect you should there be a fire in the shop. (So far I've only had that happen once.) It can be as simple as using a thumb drive that goes home with you each night, or there are any number of cloud backup solutions.

Thank you Randall. The incremental save was one that I was not aware of.
Due to years upon years of cad work Save often is a must. Some designs change so quickly that it is a lifesaver.
I have also been doing the external backup thing for a few years now and that has saved me a couple of times.
My favorite is the 4GB USB jump drive in a victorianox small Swiss army knife. Fits nicely on my keychain and not too bulky.
Plug it in soon as I get to work and that way I cannot leave work without remembering my USB stick.
Thanks again.

There are also a couple of file backup gadgets that I wrote before the increment and save feature was added but they might still be useful as they work in a different way. For ease of use they can be assigned to one of the Gadget shortcut keys.

http://gadgets.vectric.com/V9/job_backup.html

thanks Adrian.

Rcnewcomb wrote:Now that a new release of the Vectric software is out this is a good time to remind people of some of the features in VCarve and Aspire, and also in Windows.

<Ctrl Alt S> or File/Increment and Save - This is cooler and easier than File/Save As. The Increment and save operation allows you to automatically number iterations of files you are working on. If you select this operation when editing a file which ends with an underscore, or a hyphen followed by a number, then the number will be increased by 1 and the file will be saved using this number.

For example, MyFile_1.crv3d becomes MyFile_2.crv3d MyFile-1.crv3d becomes MyFile-2.crv3d
The increment and save option will keep incrementing until it finds a file that does not currently exist. It will not overwrite an existing file.

Never noticed that command. Definitely in use now. Thanks

Thank you for pointing that out.
Kathy

Great advice Randall and I thank you for sharing this information and putting the file examples up to show how it works. Have a great day/night.

Cheers - Fred.

There are some good after-Christmas sales on external hard drives (eBay, NewEgg, BestBuy, etc.). Windows 10 makes it particularly easy to set up automated backups.

All good suggestions. Bottom line, do some sort of backup program.

I use Microsoft's Onedrive to store all my data files a nice side to using Onedrive besides being accessible from anywhere is Onedrive has a "Version History" so every time a file is saved the old version is save. To access the version history, just go to your Onedrive online account locate the file in question, right click the file, a window will popup with the file's version history.

Thanks for the tips here. First order of business today is to implement backing up my files, locally and to an external hard drive.

My question is....Is it enough to just save my .crv files or should I also save the .mmg file separately?

I thought I have read about people saving the .crv and .mmg file separately in the same folder. I don't understand why as wouldn't both be saved in the .crv file if I have toolpaths generated?

Thanks for any help

Is the mmg file the toolpath file for your machine? If so there's not really any need to back that up as everything you need to regenerate it is in the CRV file.

I never save toolpath files. In fact my Aspire is set up to create toolpath files automatically with the same name each time and each new job therefore overwrites the previous one.

Thank you Adrian. Yes the .mmg is the toolpath for my machine...an Axiom.

Just backed up all files on an external hard drive and FEEL so much better now . Next up is following the Windows 10 tutorial that Rcnewcomb posted in his original post.

Bumping this thread to remind people that adding an automatic backup to an external hard drive is very easy to set up and relatively inexpensive. You can still find 4TB external drives for around $89 on site such as eBay, NewEgg, Amazon, and BestBuy. I've seen 8TB drives for around $139 USD.

Even 32GB thumb drives can be purchased for under $10.

If you currently don't have some sort of automated backup, please take a few minutes and set one up.

Here is a 4 minute YouTube video on how to set it up: How to BackUp Your Windows 10 PC to an External Hard Drive

An update to this thread. As the California wildfires got closer to my house (3 miles from the evacuation zone) it was evident that my on-premises backups were at risk. I signed up for expanded cloud storage and backed up my shop system to the cloud. I've set it up to automatically backup whenever I'm on the network.

I still like using external hard drives and thumb drives for the speed of backups and restorations, but there is peace of mind in knowing that I have secure off-site backups as well.

Some of the cloud providers are:

• Google
• One Drive (Microsoft)
• iCloud (Apple)
• DropBox
• Carbonite
• Other Online Backup providers

Take care Randall, hope you and your family are spared the fires.