How would you - deleted family?

[eviele]

Scenario.
We have a large dormitory project nearly complete with CD's due in three days.
Someone deleted a detail family, specifically the AISC Angle Shapes-Section family.
That means all angles from the project were deleted impacting nearly one hundred views.
The family was deleted around 3:00PM.
One user left early at 1:30 or so.


The question is, how can we get all families back into the central file?
Is there a way to do it from the machine of the user who left early?

Thanks for your answers in advance.

Eric

[twiceroadsfool]

Someone did a Select All Instances and deleted them? Ouch. :(

You can turn a users Local File in to the new Central File, which will have the angles, but then you will lose whatever work was done by other users since that user left the office.

Otherwise, its going to be a Copy | Paste fest...

[dfriesen]

Yep, sounds to me like you'd be best off opening the 1:30 file, and Save As Central onto the file server, and everyone re-doing the work that was lost. Some of the work may be able to be copy/pasted from the users' local files. And then let them take out their frustration on the perpetrator. :?

I think that would be faster than copy/pasting into hundreds of locations, and replacing any dimensions that were lost.

[iamreavis]

Just goes to show that there is value in leaving early occasionally! You should give that guy a raise!

[Rachel Ritchie]

Eric,
How about this...in the file where you still have the angles...can you save that local (but not to central). Then close it, open it back up...but detached from central. This way it's in your virtual memory and doesn't have a "name". Then make a local copy of the central file where stuff is missing and open that but linked to the central file. Then in the detached file...select and angle, right click and select all instances, then go to a plan view. with them still selected and use the Edit pull down and copy to clipboard.
Then in the linked local...go to the same plan view, and use the Edit pull down and Paste aligned current view.
In theory, everything should go right back in place.
That's what I would do at least.

[twiceroadsfool]

Paste Aligned > Current View isnt going to put them back in the hundreds of views theyre missing from. I dont believe Paste Same Place would work either, hence the need to recreate the Central from that local file...

[eviele]

Actually, we didn't discover the problem until last night.
At that point we had ten people working on the project for three to four hours. That's roughly forty hours of work that would be lost if I took the old local file with the angles and saved it over the central file.

I figured it would be better to have one person replace all of the angles from one of our backups rather than lose all that work.

Before we did that though, I opened the local file that still had the angles and I tried to rename the family. The thought was that we could change the name and save to central, then after everyone reloaded, change the family name back to the original.
This almost worked.
We did get a message about the family being deleted in the central file and something about worksets. So we right clicked on the family, made worksets editable and succesfully renamed the family. We saved to central and it didn't work.
What did work oddly was that the sheet I was in when doing the above trickery had angles in it. After doing the above, the angle types that were in the sheet were preserved in that sheet and that sheet only. So, in theory, if I had all sheets open would I have saved all of the angles?
I really don't know...

What I did to help the copy paste process was to create a new filter in the backup file that highlighted the angles in bright red, then we sorted the project browser by scale knowing the angles only showed in a few scales. We created a template with the filter, applied it to all relevant views and then we could easily see, copy and then paste the angles from one project to the next. It only took three hours to copy/paste from the backup view to the active project. This is not bad for nearly one hundred views...

I was hoping with my original post to learn about what to do if it ever happens again.
Sounds like there aren't many options.


...thanks for all the replies. :)

Eric