Ahoy, Autodesk management:

I am a long time user of Autocad --  presently ACAD11.

Your drawing recovery 'schemes' are for IT's and other 'geeks' who are not troubled by the complexity of the process.

We engineers and designers --USERS OF YOUR PROGRAM  --  mostly don't know how to make our way through the drawing recovery process. We are designing things, not mastering IT/geek tasks!  Look at sources --  such as your web sites and Google --  to see how mystified many of we ACAD users are about how to recover a lost drawing despite a five minute automatic save.

You properly ought to be seriously embarrassed about this delinquency on your part.

I just lost a couple of hours work, due to a 'shut-down'.

I've spent a good hour, trying, one more time, to recover a  --.SV$ file.    I expect that it is there   --  somewhere  -- but I'm not clever enough to find it.

The SV$ file should be parked out in plain view, for all to see, immediately  below the .dwg and .bak file,  so that one can re-establish/reconstruct  where you were before --  five minutes before.

You guys are paid a lot of $$$$$$$$  (what? not enough digits??) to solve these problems.

And, I'm an old retired Navy guy, bitching about what you are up-to.

But:  I knew how to take names and kick ass!.

Fix it !!!! 

Enjoy      / s/   Bob