Irricad

Happy Friday fellow Irricad users. I have an issue that is not very fun that I need help with. Yesterday, I experienced something I have never encountered in Irricad / Brics Cad Plug-In. I had a dwg design file corrupt after having worked on it for weeks. I tried the steps to recover a corrupted dwg file that I found online and had very poor results. The design file is now accessible but I can't manipulate anything or access any information from it. Being in a rush to complete this design and sell the materials I decided the only option I had was to start from scratch and completely redo the design. This worked until the file corrupted again for no good reason. The strange thing is I was doing my normal operations. Again, this has never happened to me until now in which it has happened twice. If anyone has encountered this problem before I would love to know how they dealt with it and if they figured out the underlying reason for this issue. Thank you!

Can you email a copy of the design to me at my Nelson email? You are using quite an old version of IRRICAD Link. There have been many improvements since your version.

Thanks

Graham Hutchinson

I'm not sure what version you are using, but this happens to me often in the more recent versions.
My tips:

• Save often. (Ctrl+S/QS are your best friends)
• I usually save major revisions as a new file so it's easy to go back to something previous.
• When the file gets large and has been changed multiple times I will do an AUDIT to fix all errors and a PURGE to remove unused blocks.
• Tree blocks seem to be a resource hog. I only use them in the initial layout and to get plant counts. Then I freeze the layer to reduce the system impact. Freezing is better than just turning the layer off since the layer will no longer be a part of the display cache and reduces the memory used.

RECOVER has given me very mixed results. Sometimes it's fine, other times layouts are removed, layers are purged, I have seen all Irricad data removed leaving the objects un-usable. It's kind of a crapshoot on what will happen.
For files that have been corrupted, I have noticed that Bricscad will sometimes open files that AutoCAD will not and vice versa. They each seem to handle the file slightly differently and are more tolerant of different errors. (I know this is expensive and not a realistic option. More of an observation. I just happened to have a license for each.)

Good luck!

Thanks for your input Nick, however you have forgotten a very important piece.
If you use RECOVER your must run AUDIT afterwards. RECOVER does not know about IRRICAD objects but AUDIT does (since IRRICAD Link V18 and later).

The IRRICAD Team

Hi All,

Just to agree - AUDIT will be your best option to fix problematic files, if the problem is an Irricad one and can be repaired. If you find any problems that AUDIT cannot fix, please send them to us and we'll see if a fix can be added to the AUDIT command.

Nick, you are right - using 'Blocks' or 'Symbols' to represent your trees can be hard on the re-drawing. You are often placing thousands if not tens of thousands of somewhat complex objects. If this is problematic I suggest using one of the simpler geometry options to represent your trees - namely 'Circle' or 'Point':
This should be somewhat easier for the rendering. However, as you are still adding many, many, new entities, your approach with freezing the layer is still a good one.

Regards,

Dan

jovivier wrote: ↑Tue Sep 16, 2025 9:04 am Thanks for your input Nick, however you have forgotten a very important piece.
If you use RECOVER your must run AUDIT afterwards. RECOVER does not know about IRRICAD objects but AUDIT does (since IRRICAD Link V18 and later).

The IRRICAD Team

Why not just automatically run an AUDIT after RECOVERY? (Why is there an option?)

Why not just automatically run an AUDIT after RECOVERY? (Why is there an option?)

That would be ideal, but unfortunately it isn't possible. There is no real way to detect RECOVER from within the plugin - internally it just looks like you are opening a file. Indeed, in some situations Irricad may not even be loaded when RECOVER starts.

However, I would not recommend RECOVER except as a very last resort. It is a generic AutoCAD process and has no knowledge of custom objects provided by plugins (Irricad or others). This makes it extremely heavy handed - if it thinks there is something wrong with an object more often than not it just deletes it entirely. You can imagine if it were to delete the internal Irricad database your design would definitely be in trouble after that! AUDIT has knowledge of the Irricad objects, appreciates how they work and the implications of fixing errors in certain ways. Thus it is much more likely to provided meaningful corrections.