I made a simple 4 layer board and had it fabed and it mostly works. While I was waiting on OshPark I decided to make it two layer having safely backed up the .kicad_pcb and gerbers to a zip file. I forgot to back up the .sch and now I could save my self quite a bit of time if I could somehow get the net list back from the pcb at least and redo the schematic. I got rid of some stuff I thought I didn’t need but the prototype proved I did. Is that possible?
I don’t think so…
PS: for future reference - there is a zip button in the KiCAD main starter window… that catches the most important files in an archive 
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Or even better use a version control system like git.
And of course backup. Most importantly backup on a different device that is not always connected to this device. Even better if this backup device is physically located somewhere else.
In short, no. The netlist is not copied into the PCB.
In theory, with a fully routed PCB, it might be possible to trace all the tracks and pads in the PCB, and re-generate some sort of netlist, which won’t be complete, because the components are not known. Writing and debugging the script would take a while. For a simple board, not worth it.
Much better to get into the habit of not losing old versions…
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I don’t think so…
PS: for future reference - there is a zip button in the KiCAD main starter
window… that catches the most important files in an archive–
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Good to know. I guess I will just remake it from scratch. At least I have
a excel with all the pins I assigned.
I have a github account but I seldom use it. I just use it as a place to share stuff. I don’t really see how it would help to roll back changes unless I would make a new folder a day and clone it. I guess I should read up on it. I was hoping it would be like time capsule on my mac and you could roll back to a date or time. Unfortunately I did the pcb on my pc.
You don’t need a github account to use git.
To use locally, it’s quite simple. In the folder where your project is:
git init
then
git add -A
git commit -m "Your Message"
If you prefer a GUI, I use “git gui”, in windows it is on the context menu in the File Explorer.
Other tools like SVN etc are pretty similar.
It would be nice if KiCad had some hooks to add external commands like this.
git checkout “hash of commit”
Works only if you commit regularly of course.
And as @bobc already wrote. You don’t need a server. (At least for git. I’m not so sure about svn. You can always work with a local server though.)