Drawing Recovery Series - DWG with 0KB

This series of articles will go over several examples of drawing recovery methods, depending on the scenario your drawing files are currently in:

MSJ database folder 

• DWG with 0 KB 

Autosave Recovery

Saved with Errors

Missing Point Elevations

DWG with 0KB

In this scenario, you will notice that your .DWG file has 0 KB in the file location it is stored in. This points to an issue where the drawing was not able to save properly last time it was open, causing to to be stored with 0 KB, ie, with no data.

Upon attempting to open this drawing, you will get an "Error: Unexpected end of file" as shown below. Unfortunately because the .DWG file has 0 KB, attempting to recover the drawing via this method will not work, since there is no data for the program to recover from.

So in order to recover this drawing, you will have to make use of the backup files, since there is no data to recover from the .DWG file itself. We suggest first trying to recover from the last Autosave state, as mentioned in the article Autosave Recovery. But if this is not possible, then recover from the .BAK and .MBZ files as mentioned below:

1. Make sure you can view file extensions, as mentioned in the article Windows Settings to "Unhide" File Extensions and Hidden Folders
2. Create a new folder in this location called "Backup". Move the .DWG and .MSZ files into this location. (if you don't want to save this backup, simply delete those two files instead)
3. Rename the .BAK file to .DWG
4. Rename the .MBZ file to .MSZ
5. Open the drawing as normal

As with any of these scenarios, please contact Technical Support if you are seeing this happen frequently, or if any of the these or other recovery methods are not working for you.