Attention, free Fusion 360 users! All your projects will be deleted if you don't do this

Autodesk

Autodesk offers one of the all-time great software deals with its Fusion 360 CAD/CAM product. Fusion 360 is an extremely powerful and feature-rich tool that professional designers and engineers use to create their designs.

Fusion 360 is a costly tool to make, a costly tool to maintain, and a costly tool to purchase. That's why, when Autodesk also provides it free of charge for personal use, it qualifies as an all-time great deal.

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Imagine, for example, if you could get Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects for free, if you were using them solely for personal use. It would be amazing. That's the equivalent of what Autodesk is doing with Fusion 360.

There are, however, some gotchas. These are mostly small speed bumps that make the personal use version slightly less practical than the full commercial version. For example, you can only have two designs open for editing at once. I like that limitation because it means I can't accidentally make mistakes editing designs other than those I intend to be working on. But if you're a pro designer, you might not want that open for edit limitation.

Designs stored in the cloud may be deleted

Recently, Autodesk announced a new limitation that has some users worried. Autodesk calls this a "new Autodesk Fusion content storage standard," and it has to do with how long your designs are stored in the Autodesk cloud.

Fusion 360 is a cloud hybrid app. The code runs on your computer, but the designs are stored in Autodesk's cloud. With the introduction of the new content storage standard, Autodesk has announced that if you don't log in to Fusion at least once a year, "Your Fusion Content may no longer be accessible or recoverable."

Ouch.

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I have created hundreds of designs with Fusion 360 and have them stored in the Autodesk cloud. They represent an enormous amount of time and effort. My current project has been in the works for at least five months, and I've built more than 40 custom designs as part of it.

The last thing I would want would be for all that work to be deleted. It would be heartbreaking.

To be fair, Autodesk has provided free access to very powerful software and free storage. All the company asks is that we log in once every 365 days to prove we still care. But life also has a way of getting in the way, and it's entirely possible something could come up that would cause someone to miss that login deadline.

Fortunately, you can do a few things to reduce the risk.

Option 1: Set a repeating calendar entry

The easiest thing to do is set a repeating calendar entry. Autodesk says its 365 day countdown resets every time you open Fusion 360. So if you log into Fusion today and then set a repeating calendar entry for every 11 months (yes, 11), you'll be golden.

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET

I like to set this sort of reminder to 11 months instead of 12. That way, there's a little margin for error, in case you don't have time on the exact anniversary to do the login. This way, you have an automatic 30-day grace period.

Option 2: Save your designs locally

I have a few hundred projects, so the initial pass of saving all my designs to my local drive took me the better part of an afternoon. But, now that it's done, keeping it up to date will be fairly easy.

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To start with, mirror the folder structure of your projects in a directory or folder on your computer. Here's an example of how I did it for my projects.

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET

To export a design, first open it. Don't worry if it's marked as Read Only. You can still open it. Here's my design for an angle mount for a Ring Stick Up Cam, which I use to monitor my Glowforge. Once open, select Export from the file management menu.

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET

Make sure to give the file a name that's descriptive (shown at 1). Normally, the Export dialog chooses the name you've already given your design, which works for me. Then choose the .F3D file format (shown at 2). This will work for most of your Fusion designs. Finally, put it in the folder structure you created earlier (shown at 3).

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET

Now, all you need to do is rinse, wash, and repeat for all of your designs. Later, if you wish to bring in a design from local storage, go back to the Fusion 360 file management menu and choose Open.

A word about file formats

Fusion 360 will save projects in either of two file formats. Here's how the Fusion 360 backup page describes it:

.F3D: Archive file of a single design workspace.F3Z: Archive file of a distributed design, which includes all external design references. An F3Z file is a ZIP file that contains one or more F3D files.

In my experience, Fusion 360 will automatically decide if you need to save as a .F3D or a .F3Z. When I had designs that I imported into other designs (basically when I use designs as templates), those projects saved out as .F3Z. These took longer to save, so they queued during the saving process:

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET

Option 3: Pay for a Fusion 360 license

Of course, you could always pay for a Fusion 360 annual license, which is $680. At about $56/month, that's less than we pay for QuickBooks (at least since QuickBooks raised its price yet again). It's also less than the full Creative Cloud license from Adobe.

Paying customers don't have to worry about the new login storage requirements or any of the other minor restrictions placed on free users.

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On the other hand, neither Intuit nor Adobe offer free full-featured apps the way Fusion 360 does, so it's probably worth setting a reminder in your calendar and logging into Fusion 360 once a year to save $680.

Make it part of your workflow

My recommendation (to me, as well as to you) is to make exporting designs locally a part of your workflow. It's a bit annoying for currently active projects, where you might want to move designs around from folder to folder, but it works. Another approach is to never really count on cloud versions of anything and open and save designs from local disks like you do in other applications.

What do you think? Which approach will you use? Do you pay for Fusion 360 or are you using the personal license? Let us know in the comments below.

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