Recovering Data in AutoCAD P&ID or AutoCAD Plant 3D

By Andy Davis

OOPS, how can I RECOVER my Plant data?

I think that I was fortunate to visit Aberdeen before the weather hit at the end of last week. A bit surreal given that I had seen more snow in Nottingham on the Wednesday than I had in Aberdeen. Anyway, I rounded off the week manning the support desk and providing pre-sales support from the comfort of our Knutsford office.

On the subject of support: if you're using AutoCAD and are unfortunate enough to experience an application error, a much less common occurence these days, my guess is that perhaps the first thing you do is reach for the RECOVER command to recover your drawing. However, if you're using AutoCAD P&ID or AutoCAD Plant 3D then the LAST thing you should do is reach for that command as it can introduce out of sync issues with the project and database and cause really bad things to happen; use PLANTAUDIT instead. To ensure you can't use recover by mistake you could always redefine "RECOVER" in acad2011.lsp.

I was interested to read in Dennis' blog about the number of people scribbling down notes on the OOPS command, used in AutoCAD to restore the last deleted selection. At the time of writing, if you're an AutoCAD P&ID user then I would suggest that you should discard those notes. If you use OOPS to retrieve an erased piece of equipment, only the graphical symbol is retrieved, the data is not retrieved. Use the UNDO command instead to return the equipment and its related data to the drawing.