Corrupt Drawing File

[SPerman]

Does anyone have a fix for drawing files that have become corrupt? I have a couple in this condition, and it will require hours of work to rebuild them.

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[AlexLachance]

Are you able to open them? If so, the corruption could be caused by something inside the drawing.

To test this: You could start by deleting everything and seeing if you can save it and see if the error still occurs.
If you're able to save, that means the corruption is gone and was within what you deleted. You could then go through what was deleted and delete things one at a time(or a few at a time) to isolate what is the cause.


If you're not able to save them, perhaps you have back-ups that your computer/server stored, you could look into those to see if you have a back-up that dates back to before the last save of the drawing.


If they don't open, you can try the following:
-Open model before opening drawing
-Open in preview mode to see if you can see anything off
-Open in lightweight to see if it works, if it does, save as to create a new file.

[SPerman]

They open without incident. Saving is when the problem occurs.It is difficult to debug, because every time I hit save it takes 10+ minutes before giving me the error.

[AlexLachance]

Have you tried recreating a drawing to see if it isn't a geometry in the model that is causing the issue?
Do you have any rebuild symbols?
Do you have blocks that are still cached in the drawing but aren't used anymore?
You could try a 'Save-as' to see if the "partial-purge" that SolidWorks does upon creating a file fixes the issue.

If none of these help you locate the issue, you could start of by deleting everything and then creating a new page and saving to see if it saves. If so, then you could take the original file and keep one page at a time to locate on which page the corruption is and then figure out from there what is needed to fix it. I know I'm repeating what I said previously but I don't know of any other way to rid a drawing of corruption. Pretty much the "fastest" way to do it that we figured out without having to recreate entirely.

[SPerman]

I was able to open the previous version from PDM and it seems to be OK.

[AlexLachance]

I was able to open the previous version from PDM and it seems to be OK.

That's great, hopefully the version you were able to pull only needed a few minor adjustments.

[Ryan-3DS]

How about trying to do a Save As and save locally? A different location other than your current path. Then you can remove a network or permission issue from your debugging process.

[SPerman]

I have a temp folder outside of PDM and outside of Onedrive that I use for issues like this. It made no difference.

[jcapriotti]

@SPerman Do yo have backup copies on in SolidWorks by chance?

[SPerman]

No. I turned backups off in 2019 when my computer would spend 8 minutes saving, allowing me to work for about 2 minutes before saving again.

[Damo]

I was able to open the previous version from PDM and it seems to be OK.

This is the only fix I've ever gotten to work when this happens to me.
Resort to a back-up file.

This has definitely happened to me several times before.

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Corrupt and Cannot be Saved...png (7.22 KiB) Viewed 4468 times

Corrupt Drawing File.png (9.55 KiB) Viewed 4468 times

F@#K.png (8.02 KiB) Viewed 4468 times

It has even happened to "AutoRecover" files. So, Yeah, I've given up on those too..

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Curious, does the model (part/assembly) the drawing is connected to, open and save correctly.
Sometimes for me, it has been a corrupted part that caused an assembly to not save, which in turn affected the drawing.
There are several reasons they do this too. It can be difficult to pin down.
But yes, If I recall correctly, it was usually about a "part" that corrupted.

You could send the fileset to your VAR and they may be able to help.
But they've never successfully helped me.

[RichGergely]

Try this. RC on the solidworks icon on desktop. Go to compatibility and click to run this program as administrator.

It may work.

[SPerman]

The drawing file(s) in question are atypical for me. They are a combination of 9 prints for the marketing department. They reference 3 different assemblies and 2 different parts in one drawing file. I'm sure that level of references is just asking for trouble, but it hasn't given me problems in the past.

The "run as administrator" is a good suggestion. I will try that next time it happens.

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[CarrieIves]

Do you have flag notes in the drawing? I have had some interesting issues around flag notes. Though, I think I couldn't open the drawing. We tend to have multipage assembly drawings with lots of flag notes and the numbering continuing on the next page (Manually adjusted through paragraph properties). I have had the drawing have problems if I ended up with more than one of the same number flag note. Because of that, I am very careful to adjust the numbering on later pages before I add a note that will become a flag note.

[Frederick_Law]

Try copy each sheet and paste in a new drawing file.