In Dec 09 i bought a new laptop and stopped working on my June 06-originated work to do a fork of that work just before and then after the purchase.

I hadn't paid attention until last weekend, but i notice that my materials properties disappeared. I suspect this is because when i moved my VCP work to the new disk, i must have not replaced or edited the file for materials.

Is it possible that if i had correctly copied the materials file from the old to the new disk that i wouldn't have this problem?

If not, then...

Would it be possible to save the materials props in a drawing file, or if not, then save the relevant files in the directory for the drawing? This way, if we fork a drawing, edit some materials, save it, and then return to another drawing, and edit that, we don't have to worry that somewhere down the road we will lose the properties.

For now, it's not a big problem because all my materials of interest were the same material. But, had i gone to use 4 or 5 materials on the hundreds of solids in the .vcp, it might be frustrating to resolve.