Kicad 5 annotator reset all values suddenly

[love2jump]

Hi all, first post, longtime kicad user -
Updated to kicad 5 yesterday, and something happened that i’ve never encountered:

Today i was wrapping up a schematic with over 100 components linked to a finished PCB. I appended another schematic from a different project and erased all but a small section, which i was then adding to the main project.
When i went to annotate the project’s schematic (with the default “keep existing annotations” box selected), it re-assigned all of the components in the entire project to different reference numbers. I only realized this after saving the new netlist and opening it in pcbnew. That rendered the PCB now completely confused (unless I manually reassigned all of the components with the “new” references). I really don’t want to do that - but from what I can tell, the netlist is irreversible.
More importantly than starting from scratch, how can I ensure this never happens again? Is this a known bug? Is there any way to recover the reference numbers from the pcbnew file?
Thanks,
Chris

[Rene_Poschl]

To get your project back to a usable state you could use “by timestamp” in the netlist import or in the update pcb from schematic tool.

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The behavior you experienced is not expected so you could raise a bug report if there does not already exist one that reports the same thing.

[love2jump]

thanks for the response. I haven’t heard of the “update PCB from schematic” tool - where is that? Timestamp import doesn’t seem to help.

[John_Pateman]

Here (on macOS at least) - I presume all other OS variants have the same menu structure.

[love2jump]

absolute lifesaver. thank you both!