Lena now has a sticky note on her monitor: “Covadis 16 is backwards compatible. Your workflow is not.”
That word— should —is the most dangerous word in civil engineering.
The 2018 file wasn’t broken. It was frozen in time . Covadis 16, running on AutoCAD 2024, could see the ghost of the old data but couldn’t wake it up without a migration sequence. covadis 16 compatibilite autocad
The email landed in Marc’s inbox at 7:42 AM on a Tuesday. Subject line: “URGENT – Pavement collapse on Avenue Victor Hugo.” The attached DWG file was from the city archives—a survey of the street’s underground utilities, dated 2018.
Covadis 16 includes a “Migration Wizard” for files from versions 13-15. Marc had skipped it, assuming newer AutoCAD would brute-force compatibility. It doesn’t work that way. The wizard doesn’t just open the file; it decompiles old Covadis primitives and recompiles them into Covadis 16’s native schema. This is mandatory, not optional. Lena now has a sticky note on her
Marc closed AutoCAD 2024. He reopened the file using the dedicated (which forces the correct AutoCAD version profile). He ran the Migration Wizard on the 2018 drawing, selecting “Full conversion with attribute preservation.”
Lena ran a diagnostic using Covadis 16’s “Audit de Dessin” tool. The results flashed red: “34 Covadis 14 objects detected. 12 orphaned attributes. 1 corrupted terrain model reference.” It was frozen in time
“The 2018 file was made with Covadis 15,” his junior technician, Lena, said, peering over his shoulder. “We’re on Covadis 16 now, with AutoCAD 2024. It should work. Should. ”