An AutoCAD drawing may survive as the saved DWG, a previous-save BAK or an autosave SV$ file. After a crash, inspect Drawing Recovery Manager first. Use copies for manual renaming and keep every original candidate until you have checked geometry and references in AutoCAD.
Start with Drawing Recovery Manager
For AutoCAD desktop, open Application menu > Drawing Utilities > Open Drawing Recovery Manager, or use the documented DRAWINGRECOVERY command where applicable. Expand the affected drawing entry and compare the available DWG, backup and autosave timestamps. Open a suitable candidate and save it under a new DWG name.
The manager describes drawings open during a failure; it is not a complete historical archive of every drawing. A drawing never saved at least once may not be tracked. Autodesk’s recovery instructions and AutoCAD 2024 recovery guidance describe the available routes.
Use BAK and SV$ for their actual purposes
A BAK generally holds the state before the most recent manual save when backup creation was enabled. Look beside the DWG unless the backup location was changed. Make a copy, change the copy’s extension from .bak to .dwg, and open that copy in AutoCAD.
For autosave, inspect Options > Files > Automatic Save File Location or the SAVEFILEPATH setting. The interval is controlled under Open and Save or SAVETIME. Copy a relevant .sv$ to a working folder, change the copy to .dwg, and open it. Enable file-extension display so the resulting name is actually .dwg, not .dwg.sv$.
Autosave must have run while the drawing was modified. Autodesk explains that successful saves and normal closure can remove autosave files. An .ac$ temporary file is not a recoverable drawing backup. See Understanding backup and autosave files.
If the drawing was deleted
Check Recycle Bin, existing backups and delivered project copies. If the source disk is readable, XRecovery can search remaining files; save recovered candidates to another physical device. Use AutoCAD’s own tools to assess structural damage to a recovered DWG.
For an existing damaged candidate, preserve it before AutoCAD’s native recovery/repair tools. Prefer a complete earlier drawing when available; a repair report and a successful open do not alone establish that every object survived.
Verify the usable drawing
Check model-space extents and known geometry, dimensions, layers, blocks, layouts and viewports. Inspect external references, images, fonts and plot dependencies. Compare critical coordinates or quantities against a trusted reference. Plot a representative layout to a new output file and inspect it. Save and reopen the selected DWG separately, recording any missing objects or references rather than silently treating partial salvage as the finished drawing.
For the next step, see Document Recovery: Deleted, Unsaved, Overwritten or Damaged?.