linking revit arch 2011 into revit arch 2012

[william_cooper]

I have a project file that has arrived in the office which is in 2012 format. Our internal files are 2011. I need to link our 2011 files, which we will not be upgrading, into the 2012 file for refererece without upgrading them. Is this advisable/possible?

I have tried it on a small, clean file and it seems ok i.e. without upgrading the link, but when i try the working project files it responded with a "cant load file due to errors..." error.

Any ideas?

Cheers

[jsteinhauer]

William,

You may have already experienced this, but you are not able to link a newer version of Revit into a previous version. When linking a previous version, Revit will temporally upgrade all linked files that are not current. Well this is temporary, everyone accessing that project will experience the same slow startup, every time they open the file. Depending on the # of files & file size that needs to be upgraded, you could be sentencing your coworkers to 5-10 minutes of waiting. If Revit crashes, another long wait. It might be better to upgrade a copy of that file, and link that in instead. Once the project is over, unlink the upgraded file, and link back in the previous version file.

Cheers,
Jeff S.

[DaveP]

What's your reasoning for staying in 2011?
I often hear that people (firms) don't upgrade projects & only use the most recent version on new projects.
We've been using Revit for 8 years, and upgrade every active project every year.
It takes a lot of coordination with consultants to make sure that everyone upgrades each project at the same time, but we've never had a problem with upgrading, and I've done literally hundreds of projects.

We've found it's a much bigger pain to keep track of which project is in which version than just "just" upgrade everything a fairly short period of time.

[jsteinhauer]

As an example, I have been testing upgrading my current 2012 project to 2013. I did not remove any links (6 total). I am over an hour thus far for upgrading a detached copy of my central file, and its still going.


1hr -17 min.

[MikeJarosz]

Some upgrades require new equipment. I have checked around and despite the fact that Autodesk states that Revit 2013 will run on XP, everyone recommends Win 7. For us, that means new equipment for most of the staff. Autodesk subscription won't help us buy the latest screamer...

[DaveP]

I always rename all of the Central files and then start upgrading the Links first.
That way Revit won't find the link and won't try to upgrade it.
Once a file is upgraded, it gets saved back as the original name.
I save the "main" file for last. By the time I get to the "main" project, all of the Links have been upgraded and saved as their original names, so the don't need a temporary upgrade.

[DaveP]

Some upgrades require new equipment. I have checked around and despite the fact that Autodesk states that Revit 2013 will run on XP, everyone recommends Win 7. For us, that means new equipment for most of the staff. Autodesk subscription won't help us buy the latest screamer...

It's not necessarily the new version that needs a new machine. The problem i usually that by the time you upgrade to a new version, you want to do so much more with Revit that your model had gotten bigger.
But if your project worked in Revit 2012 running on (shudder) XP, it would probably run fine is 2013 under XP.

We switched over to Win7-64 about 2 years ago and our (XP-32) crashes simply stopped. Under XP, people were lucky if they only crashed twice a day.
But it was because we were USING more of Revit, not that Revit itself needed more.

[gbrowne]

We were using 2012 on XP (with 4 gig ram) and it was fine. We started using 2013 on XP and it was extremely unstable. Luckily I was due for an upgrade and got W7 (with 12 gig ram) and 2013 works fine. I'd suggest you don't use 2013 with XP. Obviously there are a whole bunch of variables such as project size, graphics cards, processors etc but the same projects or tiny tiny basic new ones went from solid in 2012 & XP to unusable in 2013 & XP.