Archiving Best Practice

[jeff.95551]

So we've got our first huge project in Revit going into the city today. Besides knocking off early for beers, what is the best practice for "Freezing" a set at the point it went into the city? Should we just burn a copy onto a CD and keep it somewhere safe? We plan to keep working on some of the finish stuff, but that will of course impact the drawing set, and we need to be able to keep a clean record. Any other recommendations?

[twiceroadsfool]

We copy the central file, and then Open it and Detach from central. We also copy any models that are linked to it, and detach them from their centrals as well. Then in the archived central model, you need to repath the linked models to the ones in the archive, or they will stay tied back to the "other" linked files...

[TroyGates]

With RAC2008's new ability of binding links, you might want to bind any Revit links to the main model. This would be like binding xref's in Autocad.

[Steve_Stafford]

Detach from Central does not require you to copy the central file first. Just open the central file and check Detach from Central at the same time. Until you save it, it is a temporary file. When you save, it becomes a new separate central file.

Binding links if they are a complete building may not be exactly what you want as it may introduce changes to visibility graphics as a result of becoming a group.

[jhanby]

I am in charge of archiving our projects. Our pratice in the past with AutoCAD has been to archive the projects to cd's for easy access to all the workers and also keep a copy on a tape drive that only I have access to. I was wondering how others archive their Revit projects. I burned our biggest project todate onto a dvd because it would not fit on a cd. However when I went to test it to make sure it was readable to everyone else I got a message that says "Failed to open docuemt". I went back to where the project was on the server and it did the same thing. Does moving a project from one area of the server to another mess the file up? Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

[sandovala]

Would you recommend doing this when dealing with Revisions and Construction administration. I have a situation were, we have a project, and the project got issued for construction 8 months, the project still had some interior finish changes, plus the various addenda during contruction that followed. The revit team working on this project continued to work as usual, making changes. Well, they have been asked to reissue an updated set of documents, when they started printing, they found details that had changed that were not part of any addenda, nobody had touched it and you know Revit's moto (Changing one thing affects and makes the change everywhere else). They don't know what to do now as they are now checking just about every detail on a sheet to make sure that nothing has changed. This makes there work very inefficient. Does any one have any recommendations?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

For 'record sets' I will print to DWF (or PDF if you choose) and name the set for the drawing issue. This way you always have a snapshot of the set as it was plotted when first issued and can reprint at any time. Our local printing shops also keep archive copies on their server as a service (and so they don't have to go through any processing time again)

Once the drawings have been issued any addenda and changes are reflected in the model and marked using the revision tracking tools in Revit.

[sandovala]

Thanks Dmitri for the post, that is what I would recommend except that some of my staff is complaining of the model changing, and they don't want the model to change, except for the changes they make to the detail. Without having two models (one as archive and one for CA) I don't know of a way we could fix this.

[bclarch]

Don't forget offsite storage. When we dead file a job we burn two Cds. One is kept here in the office with the archived paperwork and the other one goes home with the owner of the firm. Even if the office burns down we have a full set of archived projects at the owner's house. (I take home a daily backup on a removeable hard drive to provide day-to-day offsite backups for our active projects.)