Auto Recovery

The auto recovery feature of Capture is designed to protect you from losing work as a result of a system crash or power outage. Capture automatically saves the state of the open design and library files at the end of each interval set in the Miscellaneous tab of the Preferences dialog box. Capture removes auto-saved files from your system when a project is closed and when you exit Capture normally. The Preferences dialog box appears when you choose Tools – Preferences.

Auto recovery is not an automatic saving feature intended to replace the Save commands. If you intentionally exit Capture without first saving your changes, they will be lost. Auto recovered files are automatically deleted when you exit Capture normally.

Auto-Saving files

The FILES.ASL auto-recovery file

Capture maintains a file called FILES.ASL in the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory that has a list of all design and library files that have been opened. Capture updates FILES.ASL when a project is opened or closed. If your system goes down without exiting Capture, FILES.ASL has a list of design and library files that were open for editing when the system failure occurred.

Auto recovery works on a timer that you can set to specify how often (if at all) you want Capture to auto-save the currently open and modified design and library files.

The frequency can be from five minutes to every 120 minutes (2 hours).

When the interval is reached:

1. Capture examines all open design and library files.
2. If a file that is part of the project is open for editing, Capture examines it to see if it has been modified since the last auto-save.
3. If it has, it is saved to the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory.
4. If the project itself has been modified, or one of its files was auto-saved, the project itself is saved to the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory.
5. When this happens, the auto recovered version of the project file is updated such that the path of any auto-saved designs or libraries change to point to the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory.
6. Any paths of ".\" are changed to point to the directory the project was loaded from.
7. Capture can then open the project from the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory with all paths pointing to the correct location: the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory for those files that were auto-saved, and the original location for those files that were not modified and therefore not auto-saved.

When a project is closed normally, all auto recovered files in the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory for that project are deleted.

Restoring auto-saved files

• When you start Capture, it checks for the FILES.ASL file.
• If Capture finds the file, it reads it.
• If Capture exited abnormally the last time it was used, and there are design and library files listed in FILES.ASL, Capture opens the design and library files from their original locations.
• Capture then appends "(Restored)" to the project manager's title to indicate that the project was loaded as a result of a previous system failure.
• Capture also looks for design and library files that were auto recovered to the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory.
• If any are present, Capture opens them, changes their name to a default name (like PROJECT1), adds "(Restored)" to their project manager's titles, removes the file name and directory from the project manager window, and marks the project as modified.
• Capture then looks in the project for any files that reference the \WINDOWS\TEMP directory.
• Any files that do are auto recovered to the Windows temporary directory, are opened, their filenames and directories are removed from their project manager windows, and they are marked as modified.