destroying my last pic? driving a miniature motor

[Darrel Taylor]

That would be great if you could tell me how to keep it from corrupting the file when it gets big.

Once it goes over about 500 pins or so, things start going haywire. (I have an 850pin license).

I'll be working away and suddenly after moving something, the rats nest goes crazy.
Yellow lines between things that shouldn't even be connected together. When you hit F2 over a trace, it shows it's not assigned to any nets anymore, it's just blank.

If I don't have the rats nest turned on when it happens, it may go unnoticed and get saved that way. Then I'm really cork-screwed. I have to search thru the auto-saved files hoping it hasn't gone too long, or it gets over-written. When that happens I start searching through the dozens of saved files I have, since I have to save after every successful placement, if not I lose hours at a time worth of work.

It's a serious PITA.
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[RussMartin]

See my private message.

[RussMartin]

Well, the first things I would need to know: Are you talking about WinDraft (for schematics) or WinBoard (for board layout)? And which version of either?

Generally speaking, when you start crowding your pin limit (yes, 500 is crowding an 850 limit) with WinBoard, things can sometimes get a little flaky.

One reason I may have fewer problems is that I'm an old guy and have never completely trusted personal computers. So whenever I'm doing something that creates a file, I automatically hit CTRL + S anytime I make a significant change. (I started doing this over 25 years ago, I think with WordStar on a CPM system--it was a Kaypro. It's still a habit.)

Another reason I likely have fewer problems is that I run all of my IVEX stuff on a separate computer that does nothing else but schematic and board work--it's a cheap old clunker (Compaq Presario 1700), but it does the job just fine, since I don't use it for word processing and Internet and E-mail and who knows what else. All the programming duties on the bench are handled by another even older clunker (Compaq Armada 1700).

You may have noticed with WinBoard that, anytime you move something, it recalculates.

The simplest recovery (if you've saved the file regularly) is to close the file, re-open it, and simply re-import the netlist.