Better than AUDIT, Better than RECOVER, the new RECOVERALL

Yesterday morning got out to a rather chaotic start for me. Within the first couple hours of the day I had 3 support requests in queue, all urgent, and for a mid-day submittal. Not to bore you with details, but essentially one was related to Sheet Set Manager crashing in the middle of the job. The second with AutoCAD only plotting the viewport, and not the titleblock.  Putting the icing on the cake was the final request where the user couldn’t even get into her drawing (even after running a RECOVER).

So why am I boring you with my morning activities?

All mind you without the aid of coffee.

My reason it simple - the solution for each of the above support requests ended up being the same. Those familiar with troubleshooting quirky drawing behavior are likely yelling two commands at the monitor about now; AUDIT and RECOVER. Both of which have been my best friends when troubleshooting such issues in the past.

Today however I got to truly put what is now my new favorite AutoCAD command through its paces. Want to know what it is?

RECOVERALL

Now for the better question; why is it any better than AUDIT or RECOVER. After all they have each treated us well until this point - right?

The shortcomings of both the AUDIT and RECOVER commands is the fact they can only scan 1 drawing at a time. In a scenario like the 3 I had yesterday morning, each drawing had a handful of Xrefs which would have meant me having to individually opening each one. Introducing the RECOVERALL command?

Generally speaking the AUDIT, RECOVER, and the new RECOVERALL command all do the same thing. They scan a drawing for errors, and fix whatever it finds. Where the RECOVERALL command pulls ahead in the race is the way it can scan numerous drawings in a bit of a batch routine. In my case I had drawing sheets that wouldn’t plot because of errors coming from Xrefs.

Using the RECOVERALL command I was able to simply point AutoCAD to my drawing sheet, and it did the rest. It ran a recover not only on my drawing sheet, but also my model (reference) drawings; correcting errors along the way.

As I said, the RECOVERALL command is a new command, only available in AutoCAD 2008. And while I hope you never run into erroneous DWG files, I know better. So go ahead and pull out your stack of Post-It?s and write this one down!  Have a great Friday!