this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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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.

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[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most people learn why you should back up everything the hard way I'm afraid.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] the_third@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Full backup of home daily, full backup of root every week.

[–] FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I work in IT and I get that, but we also should have some reasonable expectations here for how a program should handle updates. Not losing key configuration files is definitely one of those.

[–] agent_flounder@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah that is seriously terrible application behavior.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah that really sucks!

[–] lapis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] xenspidey@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

This is the way. It integrates so nicely with klipper as well. I've been a slicer switcher for a long time, but this is definitely my home for a while.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 1 year ago

Someone else I trust recommended this, too. Thank you.

[–] dumbcrumb@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 1 year ago

Yea, planning to give it a try. I just found the settings in .local/share/cura so that's at least a good thing, but what a headache.

[–] algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Stampela@startrek.website 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] bluewing@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

While I have always preferred PrusaSlicer, since I do own a Mk3s+, I used to use Cura also. But it just seemed to get worse with every new update/release until I just quite using it at all. Makes me sad because there were some good things things there I really liked.

[–] wccrawford@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I tried Prusa Slicer and didn't care for the UI. I ended up with Orca Slicer instead.

[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been on the prusa slicer side of things for a long time, and you won't see me arguing in favor of cura. That said, you should probably consider doing daily backups of your home folder, using something like Borg/restic which have great incremental and compressed backups (practically backing up TBs in seconds).

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks, but everything is in my dotfiles repo, it's just that cura ignores the files from the old version.