Oh boy …. rant following (hey, you asked for the details):
About 6 or so months ago, my ‘recent data’ (not at the windoze box so I can’t confirm what it’s called) listing decided to loose the vast majority of it’s entries. Eventually it was decided that re-installing Fusion was the thing to do which broke a whole bunch of customizations and add-ons. That was my first encounter with a file system that is partially broken.
A couple of days ago I attempted to start working on an older design (Dec 24). I didn’t know the exact name and it wasn’t in my ‘recent data’ listing. I used the search function in Fusion to look for any files that include the word ‘Drawer’. I got a whole bunch of hits - way more than there should be. Most of these files could not be loaded. Tech support remoted into my computer to see what was going on but had no idea what was happening and it was decided to push the issue to level two support. I have a problem leaving good enough alone so I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what was happening. As it turned out, the search that fusion did when it was looking for the word ‘Drawer’ somehow included all my deleted files. They could not be loaded because the files no longer existed in the regular Fusion file system. The search results had been ‘poisoned’ with invalid data.
Fusion allows for web access to the file system and this access lets me see deleted files, restore them or erase them permanently. Every folder and every sub folder has it’s own ‘trash’ listing. Since the search result was poisoned by the files that were in the trash system, I had the bright idea to permanently delete SOME of these previously deleted files. I went to the main folder for all my projects and mass deleted everything in the ‘trash’ folder. Autodesk, in their infinite wisdom, decided that this obviously meant that I wanted to delete not just the relevant files in the chosen folder but also the content of ALL the trash files in ALL sub folders. This is a permanent delete that can not be undone!
While this fixed the issue of the poisoned search results, it precluded me assisting in any sort of further trouble shooting with tech support. The poisoning was a glitch that only affected the existing deleted files and any new deleted files no longer appeared in the search results.
Since the search function seemed to work again, I did another search for ‘drawer’ (notice lower case ‘D’) which got no results. I did another search using ‘Drawer’ (notice upper case ‘D’) as the key word and got two hits. Additional searches found the hits even when searching for ‘drawer’! Unfortunately a particular file that included the word ‘Drawer’ in it’s file name was NOT found. I had it loaded and in front of my face yet a Fusion search did not find it!
This is ok when you have a small library of files but when you hit 50 or 100 files you can no longer go through each file manually. If you can’t find the file via the search function you have as much as lost the file and the work that was required to generate the model.
A bit more searching on the internet found complaints about the totally useless search function at least 5 months back. In conversations with Autocad/Fusion, people complained of many many hours of wasted time because files could not be found. Some people went as far as to say that Fusion was unusable for them because of this issue. It was a BIG deal! Yet, after some 5 months (or more), Fusion has still not fixed a fundamental failure in their software!
I could understand if we are talking about a beta level piece of software from a hole-in-the-wall developer but it boggles the mind how a software package that was released in 2013 by a major player in the cad market could have a fundamental flaw like that unfixed for 5 or more months.
Fusion has monthly releases. Bugs are fixed and new features are added. A lot of the bugs are what I would call ‘esoteric’ but they get fixed. A bug that is fundamental to the entire package is not fixed???
I suppose they could be severely understaffed in their development team but they are building fancy new features while ignoring bugs that make the software unreliable and/or non usable! The priorities are screwed up.
There are more things I could list but the broken search functionality was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Yes, I will likely still use Fusion because I am reasonably familiar with it but I am not shelling out $700 (or whatever) for a yearly license.
