Excessively large DWG files

[rcrabb]

So I guess part of my job includes some form of "file management."

It has been brought to my attention that one of the engineers is creating files that are over 10,000 KB, sometimes upward near 30k. When I opened the drawing, there was nothing for me to purge or otherwise reduce the filesize. However, if I copy the drawing, paste it into a new file, and then re-save, its only 140KB. Any ideas of what might be set up wrong on this guy's computer? I can attach one of the drawings if it would help ...

Thanks, this one has me stumped!

[tyshofner]

Did you check and remove Layer Filters?? And run "-purge" (not just purge) with the "R" option to purge the registered applications?? If not I would definitely look into those. Especially the layer filters. Since it's just his drawings this happens to I suspect he is copying objects into drawings from some "default" file he has (or maybe he has his own template drawing that he starts with?). In either case in that default file there are probably thousands of layer filters, which will get brought over anytime he copies something. These will balloon files to enormous sizes.

Ty

[BIM BAM BOOM]

I will definitively consider the layer filters as the main issue.
We received years ago a file from one of our consultant; size = 20Mb I have a VBA o clean out the layer filters (google it ) I found 117,000 filters cleaned them the size went down to 1.2 MB! I have also clean all templates of my firm to have no filters in them that reduce significantly the files sizes. Good luck!

Did you check and remove Layer Filters?? And run "-purge" (not just purge) with the "R" option to purge the registered applications?? If not I would definitely look into those. Especially the layer filters. Since it's just his drawings this happens to I suspect he is copying objects into drawings from some "default" file he has (or maybe he has his own template drawing that he starts with?). In either case in that default file there are probably thousands of layer filters, which will get brought over anytime he copies something. These will balloon files to enormous sizes.

Ty

[rcrabb]

i did the -purge R and downloaded this layer filter removal tool

drawing went from 10MB to 9.65MB ... still missing something. even if zipped, its too large to post as attachment here in forums.

any up for an email challenge? thank you for all suggestions!

[tatriest]

Depending on what version and CAD you are running -- are there any unused Multi-View blocks that can be deleted. Once you delete these MV Blocks, you will be able to delete the CAD blocks.

Terry

[paddymackey]

You could try erasing everything thats in the drawing but not visible, works a lot of the time for me when a drawing is a large size. Items like blank attributes that have for one reason or other come unattached from a block, for example.

Erase, All
Deselect everything on screen
Enter.

This should delete everything except whats on screen (make sure all layers are turned on and unlocked first) allowing you to purge more out of the drawing, hopefully.

Plus, just in case, make a backup of the drawing first.

[rcrabb]

You could try erasing everything thats in the drawing but not visible, works a lot of the time for me when a drawing is a large size. Items like blank attributes that have for one reason or other come unattached from a block, for example.

Erase, All
Deselect everything on screen
Enter.

This should delete everything except whats on screen (make sure all layers are turned on and unlocked first) allowing you to purge more out of the drawing, hopefully.

Plus, just in case, make a backup of the drawing first.

thanks everyone for your responses. turns out there were a ton (and i mean over 200,000) of old block references within the drawing. once i deleted those through a selection set, i was able to purge out some unused layers and unused blocks. got the file from 10 MB to under 2 ...

[CADDmanVA]

I tend to have a similar problem with some of our files. The culprit is usually anonymous blocks (the ones with A$C... as a name). They tend to show up when someone prefers to use accelerator keys like CTRL+V to copy objects instead of using the COPY command. Check your block table for anonymous blocks and such. May work out for you. This could be a less invasive alternate to erasing a bunch of stuff when you're not sure what you're erasing.

[Arben.Allaraj]

i did the -purge R and downloaded this layer filter removal tool

drawing went from 10MB to 9.65MB ... still missing something. even if zipped, its too large to post as attachment here in forums.

any up for an email challenge? thank you for all suggestions!

check the variable isavepercent can be sets 0 ?

[Chris.N]

check the variable isavepercent can be sets 0 ?

i was just going to say that myself... if it's set to something other than '0', the saving is faster in that it only saves what was changed, but it has a tendency to inflate the file size untill a full save is performed.... (per 2008 help file)