How to get restore prompt a 2nd time?

[Josh]

I went to open my Kicad board and it said something like “this wasn’t saved properly last time, do you want to recover the most recent version?”
I clicked on no, thinking i could just open the autosave file. But when it opened, there was nothing there, and i opened the autosave file and it was the same.
Can i trigger it to ask me again to recover the previous version? Or by saying No have i essentially deleted the whole file?
I have the gerbers, i wonder if i can convert those back into a kicad file?

[scandey]

Just for our context, can you post your version and OS info? About KiCad > Copy Version Info provides it already nicely formatted.

(Depending on version) you should have multiple auto saved zip files stored in the project directory going back a little while (depending on your auto save settings).
Are all of them the same?

I don’t know how the recovery system works, but it is odd that it triggered out of nowhere. Normally I expect that immediately after a crash, but I’ve never seen it any other time.

To answer your other question: you absolutely can reverse engineer your gerbers in KiCad. Checkout this thread for details Reverse engineering KiCad project from Gerber files

[Josh]

Hi thanks so much for the response! Forgot to check back on this
My KiCad version is 5.1.12, OS is Windows 10, but in Kicad about it states "Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200)

Can’t see any auto saved zip files…

[paulvdh]

Start with:

1. Exit KiCad.
2. Backup the whole project directory.
   If you have a backup, then at least it can’t get any worse then it is now (unless you loose the backup, so put it on some external device).

Next step, is to look into the directory of the project with a file browser. The KiCad project manager does not show all files, and it does not show backup files.

After that, it gets fuzzy.
The good news is that the old project can be repaired, but the ugly news is that I can not predict how much work it is.

But before you continue with an attempt to rescue, why are you using KiCad V5.1.12? It is quite old. The current KiCad Version is V7.0.7 and besides many new introduced features (About 5 years worth of development), and also 5 years worth of bug fixes. (But also newly introduce bugs ). The most important change is that if you fix your project in KiCad V7, then it stays fixed. KiCad V4 had a very serious flaw in the way it handled schematic symbols, and in KiCad V5 this was “half fixed” with the [Project]-Cache.lib file. I have been struggling with this a few times in the past, and guess the whole system is a bit buggy and shaky, but I never figured out exactly the details.