Major Syncing Issues

[djm677855]

We have been using Revit for over a year now, and even completed a major project with another architectural firm with no issues. Now we are on our own working on a couple of mid-sized projects. I have set up work sharing with both projects. The problem is that revit seems to randomly change objects back to previous locations for no reason. I got to the point now that I'm having everyone rebuild their local every morning to make sure that there are no "phantom" objects that weren't being synced. Here are a couple of examples of what's happening...

One day we had to change the location of a couple of walls, Now both me and my job captain stood over the shoulder of the person making the change, they changed it, and synced, and everything worked fine that day. The VERY NEXT DAY, when everyone opened up their local, the wall was moved back to its original location. This is one example, and things like this have been happening quite a lot, and some things have been changed, quite literally, 3 or 4 times, just moving one object from its original location to the new location. My job captain is getting very frustrated that we have to change the same thing 3 or 4 times over the course of a couple of weeks.

Example 2, we were doing window elevations, all working well, and plotted them off. And hour later the grids on the windows changed from the plotted drawings. Now no one admits to changing the windows (there are 4 of us working on the projects), and we can't figure out how the grids even changed as they aren't constrained to anything.

Is there a reason that this is happening? Also, is there any way to see who changed an element last? even though there have been a few save\sync cycles since the changes have been made? I did have the idea of reviewing the backup files to see if I can find out who synced when the changes were made, but the changes were made before the last attainable backup.

Any Ideas or suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Dwayne Miller

[dhurtubise]

I got to the point now that I'm having everyone rebuild their local every morning to make sure that there are no "phantom" objects that weren't being synced.

Should have done that day 1 ;)

[KoryCox]

Install worksharing monitor from the subsricption site. It will tell you who syncs, when, and how often. A very useful tool. No way of knowing who created what specific element though.

Recreate the central files on a weeky basis. This helps to keep it stable.

That is very strange behaviour. Not something you would normally see.

If a team member doesn't save their work back to central, after a while that file becomes incompatible with the central file and they could lose their changes, but they would not be able to override what is in the central model.

Sounds like either a sabotaging prankster, or file corruption. The prior is more likely. You can generally trust Revit to keep things where you place them.

Are you working with options? Perhaps the wall was moved in an option, but another option was selected as Primary then accepted?

You could have multiple copies of the wall without knowing it if your office makes extensive use of workets. For instance, Person A is working on Workset A with all other worksets off and creates the wall then Person B is working on Workset B with all other worksets off and creates the wall. Now there are two.

I'm curious, how did the windows change? Grids within the window family, or lines on the view? Are the elevations of 3D content, or are they faked 2d elevations?

[david_peterson]

Another thing we've done beside re-creating centrals weekly and re-creating locals daily is to make sure your team members remove all of their local back-up files from their c drive. From my understanding demons still live there and can cause issues. At least that's what our re-seller has told us.
I've had "Phantom" object revert back to previous states before. This usually happens on project where I've got 9 people banging on the central file and the write/read access in the queue.
Worksharing monitor is a good idea, but don't give it to everyone. If you have to many session actively working to figure out who's sharing with who, it can overload your network. I've had it happen before. Same goes for the requests to borrow elements. Evil things can happen.

[djm677855]

Excellent, Thank you for all the great ideas everyone, I'll start getting into the habit of rebuilding the central every week and monitor the work sharing, and take it from there. Thanks a lot everyone

[Duncan Lithgow]

To see who created, synchronised and owns an element in the model: switch your view to Worksharing by owner and hover your mouse over an element. That'll give you some useful info about the element.

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