Michael Lord

My association with 2D CAD goes back to AutoCAD 12, so it’s been a while! We moved to DraftSight back in 2010-2011, around the time SOLIDWORKS dropped it’s DWG Editor/ 2D Editor program, shortly after the settlement in the Autodesk – SolidWorks “DWG” Lawsuit

We only use DraftSight, these days, as the intermediary between SOLIDWORKS and our CAM program & CNC. We might be a little old fashion as we manually export dxf files from our SOLIDWORKS models for our cabinets.

Then colour layers & manually Nest the components. But the system & process continues to work for us.

After doing some cabinet updates today, I was transferring the dxf file to our CAM computer and I did something I don’t think I have ever done before. I downloaded the file, not uploading the file & yes … overwrote the file I had been working on …..

What I didn’t do, was panic …. I took a deep breath, knowing that DraftSight automatically creates a backup file. It duplicates the file name, places it in the same folder as the original file and has the file extension of .bak
Now I have been looking at .bak files since my AutoCAD days and have never tried to use one.

Double clicking (or RMB – Open) only brings up the standard Window pop up asking you to look for an application. If it wasn’t going to open directly in DraftSight then I wasn’t going to go about trying other programs.

A little thinking for a moment and the answer was what I have done in the past, when I have had files with extension that wouldn’t open … I simply RMB – Rename or LMB select then F2 to rename.
Renaming the .bak extension to either .dwg or .dxf will bring up the scary Windows warning that the file may become unstable.

Never had that problem in the past, so … Yes I want change it …. and just like that, you now have a usable dwg or dxf file.

Sometimes you just have to apply a simple solution to a problem!