Apart from blow up printers, the one scariest thing for me about a slicer is losing settings. You spend hours getting your printer dialed in, specific profiles per material and then…
You update your slicer software and it all goes away. I have now learned Cura does this. And does this a lot. Forum posts abound about it. Friends recommend I switch to Prusa because it happened to them. Unfortunately too late for me to write down my old settings, and they’re apparently not in the ~/.config/cura folder anymore. Nice.
Most people learn why you should back up everything the hard way I’m afraid.
The problem isn’t backups. The files are there and in my dotfiles repo. The problem is Cura decided to ignore the version 0.0 folder in 5.x, which is used in 4.x, and the profiles are no longer compatible. During upgrade, it doesn’t pull those files and convert. To me, this is a major oversight for something where tweaking profiles is a huge part of the quality of the output.
Totally agree. Cura has bit me more than once with losing my settings. To Lmaydev’s point, it’s hard to “back things up” when you don’t know where the settings are stored and sometimes you don’t know you need to be Sherlock Holmes until it’s too late.
Big recommend to just jump straight to OrcaSlicer. It has Bambu Studio’s much-improved-over-PrusaSlicer UI but with features ported in from PrusaSlicer and SuperSlicer and compatibility with non-Bambu printers.
I switched from PS to Orca a few weeks ago, it is just a much better featured slicer. I also absolutely love that I can just click “print” and it automatically uploads and starts the print on my printer. Only had to enter the IP of my printer and that was it, extremely user friendly.
I’m not sure I agree the UI is better…it is different, and not entirely intuitive for me when looking for some settings.
FWIW, prusaslicer can also upload and print. The setting to enable it is a bit hidden though… (it’s in printer settings)
Yea I remember switching to prusa slicer because of this and I also seem to get nicer prints aside from seams not being great but I alsp haven’t put much effort into trying to fix that. Never lost my settings on prusa.
I think if you have a project saved, you can open it up and it’ll prompt you to override the current settings. From there you can save them and backup
Never had this problem I’ll admit, working with it on Windows. But there’s also the backups plugin I’ve been running since day 1, so in case this ever happens eh, should be good.
Did the backup plugin work between 4.x and 5.x? If so, perhaps I will try that during my transition, too. I have backups of the configs in my dotfiles, it’s just that Cura doesn’t import them between major versions.
I’ve never had issues with Cura losing my stuff (been using it with an Ender 3 since… 2019 I think) but the backup plugin is connected with your account. It’s a wonderful thing! New computer? Login, restore backup, everything is like you left it.
I do make sure to use it before any update because I have seen the same kind of posts as you have.
