Is it safe to do so? Upgrade from 9.1 to RA 2008 that is...

[Les Therrien]

I have a large project that I've been working on for a year. It's a Revit 9.1 file.
General I like to finish any project in the Revit version they were created, but I did a little test in updating this particular file in 2008. The file size went from 100000kb to approx. 30000kb when I saved in in the 2008 version. This was very appealing to me.
Now this file is not in to construction docs just yet. It's just a model.
There's no room tags and such just yet.
So what do you think? Go for it?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

C'mon Les, live a little:lol:
AFAIK there should be no issues between 9.1 and 2008. The big change came between 8.x and 9.x when room and area objects were introduced and that's the only time I've had any problems at all upgrading a project. (and even those problems were pretty minor)
The reduction in file size can probably be achieved just by saving the file under a different name.
I'd keep a copy of the old file (just in case) and do the upgrade. Revit will do an audit and does a pretty good job of finding issues and tidying them up for you. After the conversion be sure to review the error messages that might come up.

I think there are enough enhancements in the construction docs tools to warrant the grade.

[ejc]

I have been doing double duty between both. If i was to do it again, i would make the jump and been done with it. 2008 has so many helpful features (light bulb, linking, overides) that it would have been worth any issues in these already released projects.

There have been several post concerning a few irritations.

My favorites:
-Template printer settings have the "Fit" instead of "100%" checked.
-Views have the new "Annotation Crop" check on as a default. If ANY part of a text note is beyond the crop, the entire text note (arrow and all) are "cropped".

There are a few more. But I repeat, I would have prefered to upgrade 3 large projects and dealt with any issues, instead of the "oops" double clicked accidental upgrade time!

ejc

[clog boy]

To us, the benefits of upgrading outweigh any disadvantages we might've had. An extra benefit in your case is 70 MB of extra RAM to work with.
Aditionally, you might want to open with audit checked in Revit 9.1 to see if that has a similar file size impact.

It's your decision. Can you afford to? Can you afford not to? Has everyone else in the design team already upgraded? In my opinion it's safe to upgrade, but don't take my word for it.

Just in case, I'd recommend keeping 9.1 installed and a backup copy of the 9.1 compatible project until it's not an option anymore to use the 'old' version. Things should go smooth by then using 2008.

[Baldwin_4-6-0]

GO FOR IT.
RA 2008 is way more stable that 9.1. Plus you get the cool new features.
We were in Construction Docs when we did the upgrade, it went very well for us.

Just be sure to use the latest Build of RA 2008, because there was issues with the first release of RA2008 with callouts disappearing.

[Les Therrien]

Thanks guys!

I am using the latest build.
I think I'll go for it.
Like it was said, it's a pain in the arse to go between the 2 versions.
I do date the files to the day they've been worked on. So if there's ever a problem, then I can just go back to the previous!

[tomnewsom]

Done fine for me, and that's on a 300MB project that's gone from 8 to 8.1 to 9 to 9.1 to 2008, with no issues so far.