Lost Your Work? Two Ways to Recover Jobs in CABINET VISION

G’day! Here is the script from the video “How to Recover Backups Files (.bak) in Cabinet Vision!”:

It’s Clayton from Planit Canada with another Cabinet Vision tutorial! And today we’ve got a very simple, straightforward tutorial for you. And that is; how can we recover a backup file in Cabinet Vision? If you aren’t sure what a backup file is, or maybe you haven’t even seen them before, essentially we can set up Cabinet Vision so that every time we have our standard job file, that’s our ‘.cvj’ file, this is our Cabinet Vision job that we’re working in every day. Every time I open that in Cabinet Vision, Cabinet Vision can automatically create a backup file.

The advantage to this is that, should anything happen to my ‘.cvj’ file—maybe it’s corrupted, maybe it’s accidentally deleted, whatever it is—I might still have a semi-recent copy of my project to work in. So I might be able to salvage a lot of my project and not have to restart it again completely from scratch. If you don’t see the ‘.bak’ file every time you go to open up a new job and you would like it, it’s very simple to set up. We just go into Cabinet Vision, we click on File preferences, and then under General, we just make sure that ‘Create a backup copy when opening up a job’ box is ticked. So that’s very simple.

To recover a backup file, let’s just say we accidentally lose our job, it’s deleted, maybe it’s corrupted and it just won’t open even if we would like it to. We can go into Cabinet Vision, we can click on File, Job Recovery, then click on the job itself. Then, click ‘Open’, and then it’ll ask us if we want to follow through, yes. And there you go. Cabinet Vision has successfully recovered this job from the backup file.

It’s a very simple process, but if you don’t know that that tool is there, you may not be sure. So hopefully this tutorial has helped you out a lot. If you have any more questions or comments, please add them down below and we’re always happy to help out. We’ll see you in the next video.

G’day is Clayton from Planit Canada with another Cabinet Vision tutorial. Today let’s talk about backups. What are backups? How can we create them? And then how can we install or restore these backups on our workstation or on the workstation of another? It’s quite a simple process to do, but if we’ve never done it before, there’s just a few steps to make sure we remember. So hopefully you’ll be able to really take advantage of this video. So, first of all, when we do use backups, we generally, want to use backups with standalone installs of Cabinet Vision.

If we have a network install of Cabinet Vision, it’s very possible we have other settings in place to automatically share our data, so this may not be as relevant for you, but we’ll have more content that addresses specifically how we can take advantage of those systems in the future. But if we have a standalone install of Cabinet Vision, and many of us probably do, then this is the perfect way for us to preserve or share our Cabinet Vision data. So a backup is essentially a group of folders which contains the important Cabinet Vision files, that include all of our different settings and objects, etc..

If, we create a backup that snapshot in time can always be available to us. So imagine if we accidentally delete something important that we really need, having a backup means we haven’t lost it forever. We always have that information. It’s very, very useful and really everyone probably should have some sort of process in place to maintain their Cabinet Vision data or preserve their Cabinet Vision data semi-frequently. But the other advantage is imagine if we have many colleagues who are working on, the same project, maybe we share our jobs, around with different Cabinet Vision users in our company, then making sure that all of our Cabinet Visions are identical is really important.

So, to create a backup. We open up Cabinet Vision and we click on Utilities and then we click on Backup Utility. This dialog box pops up and it will ask us what we want to include in our backup. Generally, if we’re creating a backup to preserve this information for the future, more information is always better than less. Making sure that we include everything is fantastic because we don’t necessarily have to install everything, but it’s probably just a good habit to get into. If we are sharing some very, very specific data with a colleague, maybe we’ve just had to update something small. Maybe we’ve created a new material, for example, or we’ve had to update a new material. We can just make that adjustment here and then exclude the rest of the irrelevant information if we ever wanted to.

To know exactly what is being stored in each of these features, we could go through that all together, but it would blow out to a 20 minute video, I’m sure. But what I can suggest is if you go to your Help button, Help topics, and then you search Backup Utility here, and then Backup Utility. Here you will be able to see a list of all of the different options and what they’re actually storing. What data is actually relevant to each of them. So you can go through that to really get your head around it. But once we have our Backup Utility here, and if we’re happy with it, we can just click save and Cabinet Vision will start creating a backup of all of these Cabinet Vision files.

To know where this backup is being stored, we can just click on the settings button here, and here we’ll see the file path for where our backup is going to be generated. If we ever want to change where our automatic backups are being stored, we can click on these three dots here and then follow the prompts to create a new folder and, direct Cabinet Vision to create those backups in that folder instead.

Another feature I quite like is ticking this box to use the backup comment as a folder name. When we click on save backup here, Cabinet Vision is going to ask if we want to enter an optional description of this backup. This can be fantastic if we’d like to have our own references. So, you know, you could put anything from like “CV 24”, and then today’s date, “0429”, and then we can maintain a consistent naming pattern which will make it very easy for us to find information if we ever need it. But that’s really just a personal preference thing. Whatever works for you, that’s the right answer.

But once we’re happy with that, we can click on OK. And Cabinet Vision is going to start creating a copy of all those files into that folder that we’ve already chosen in our settings. This is important because once that folder is generated, that’s the folder, that we want to start sharing with our colleagues if we’re trying to share this backup, or that we want to reinstall on our own workstation if we ever accidentally delete something. So, once this is finished loading, we’ll see that the bars have disappeared and that’s the indication that this backup is ready. So, to see it, we can just open up our File Explorer to where the folder is. So yours will probably be called ‘Automatic Backups’ too by default. And then when we open that up you’ll see that our backup is there. And essentially this is what it looks like… Just all of our different Cabinet Vision files are being stored like so. So once we have our folder here, this is the folder that we would share with someone else. So, if I wanted to give that to another workstation, maybe we have a shared folder, maybe just a USB, maybe we could use like online sharing platform, whatever it may be, this is what’s relevant for our colleague.

So we can make a copy of this, and then, when we go to put this folder on their computer, we should open up their Cabinet Vision, go to their Utilities, Backup Utility, and then their settings. And make sure that the backup is put in their equivalent file path. This is where Cabinet Vision is going to look for to also restore or it reinstall the backup.

So imagine we’ve done that. Imagine we’ve gone through, created our backup, then we’ve transferred it into another computer’s folder here. How do we actually restore it? How do we reinstall it? It’s very simple to do. I can just close Cabinet Vision and now if I click on search and then type in restore. Here you can see I’ve got restore CV 2024. Once I click on that, it will open up the restore feature, the restore tool automatically. And like I said before, this is where we can choose whether or not we want to install that information or not.

If I didn’t want to, I could just untick it and then click OK. So that’s why it’s usually a good idea to create backups with as much information as possible, because you don’t necessarily have to use it, but at least we’ve got it, at least it’s there. So once we’re happy with that, we can just click OK, and then it’ll start installing these Cabinet Vision files. So that is quite a simple process, but just to make sure we remember to use the restore feature and commonly if we ever try to use a backup–if we ever try to install the backup–sorry. And we don’t see it here in this section, in this left-hand column. It’s because it’s not in the right folder. It’s not in the right file path with that correlates to our Cabinet Vision. So just keep that in mind. But otherwise, we’ll just let that finish installing. And now it’s done, it’s just closed down and we can reopen our Cabinet Vision and it’ll work.

So this is the process that we want to follow if we ever want to install a different backup or create new backups to share with our colleagues. Generally, as a good practice, we should probably have one master Cabinet Vision that everyone else’s Cabinet Vision follows. That’s probably ideal because then we’re not losing track of potentially which Cabinet Vision is more up to date than another Cabinet Vision. Having just one Cabinet Vision that all other Cabinet Visions follow, it makes just makes sharing data very clear and simple. So hopefully you feel like you’ve been able to go through the process of creating a backup, hopefully it makes sense. If you have any more questions on how backups or, good practice for sharing our data in Cabinet Vision, please put them in the comments below, we’re all happy to help. Otherwise, we’ll see in our next video.