AutoCAD .dwg files going corrupt

Hello, trying to see if anyone else is having the same issues with .dwg files going corrupt. Here is some information:

Before last week, engineers and drafter's were running Full Version 2018 AutoCAD as well as LT Versions. NO add-ons. We're in the process of upgrading everyone to 2021 Full/LT so we can eliminate it as a possibility that 2018 is the cause. This is a suggestion by our retailer of AutoCAD that it could be the cause. Up to a couple months ago everything was fine. We're not able to find something common as to what the user was doing to cause the corruption, but it does seem to happen when the user closes the .dwg. I can literally be using the file, save it... twice... and then close it. A different person goes to open it less than a minute later and it's corrupt. Sometimes a recovery works, but it's not reliable. Sometimes the recovery slaughters the file so it's not usable as well. A recovery does not necessarily recover the file.

Some info:

When we try to open the file, sometimes we get a notification that the file is corrupt, see image. Sometimes the file just does not open, no error.

Environment:
3x Windows Server 2019 Standard (In 3 different sites)
Peer Software Enterprise Global File System (designed for AutoCAD) for site locking/replicating with an IPSEC tunnel between sites
Mix of Autocad 2018 full and LT as well as 2021 (only Full versions so far)

Corruption is NOT isolated to certain people
Corruption is random, not consistent and cannot be recreated upon demand
Corruption is isolated to .dwg (and sometimes the .bak) files, no other file types are being effected
We recently replaced the servers and upgraded to server 2019, switched to a new syncing/locking system (Instead of DFSR) and the issues persist. We were hoping the server change and getting rid of DFSR may have helped or was the cause – but we have still received brand new DWGs that end up corrupted. including files saved by AutoCAD 2021

Also, the retailer is trying to tell us:

That our dynamic blocks can be the cause, that we need to recreate them from scratch.... um, 12+ years of dynamic blocks you want me to recreate? Seriously?
They recover a file and tell us that "these" blocks are looking like the cause, and list and send snips of the "blocks" - well, some of what they are calling "our blocks" are not blocks in our drawings... fragments of blocks I suspect are created by the recovery process.

"We noticed that each drawing had blocks like this “GroundWater-Dyn” that could have been the culprit, and sometimes turned into a $Recover block after the recover command." - Our drawings have many dynamic blocks in them.

Anyone else having corruption issues like this? Thanks in advance.

*If this thread would be better suited under a different heading, please move it*
...
...

It sound like you are trying to replicate live DWG files between remote sites? Is that a continuous process, or scheduled for off-hours?

That's where I would look for the root cause of dwg file corruption, I suspect it's trying to do replication whild Acad is in the middle of renaming the old dwg to bak, saving the current drawing to temp, and then renaming that to dwg.

Hello, thanks for the reply. The file syncing is real-time, so the theory that its a continuous process, then yes.
Couple things:

We've been using file syncing for a while now... couple years. We changed to a new file syncing software after the corrupt files started to happen. I suppose that an update could have happened to something, somewhere, along the line that made a tweak to have a conflict now.

A file syncs when it changes, or shortly there after.

The file can be sitting open on one computer, so syncing is not happening 'at the moment', then closed (so no changes), just to try to open up the file in the same office and it's corrupt....

I'm looking into seeing if IT can put a delay on the syncing to see if that eliminates the corruption from happening.....

Any other thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

malware, ransomware, disgruntled soon-to-be-ex employee, or some other process on the server that is monitoring/indexing dwg files. I am presuming that this does NOT happen if someone is opening or saving to the local hard drive?? correct?



I would think about setting permissions on a folder full of drawings such that only the CAD user accounts have any access, excluding system level accounts just to verify.

Or setting the synch to only happen in off-hours.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by derek.96018

We've been using file syncing for a while now... couple years. We changed to a new file syncing software after the corrupt files started to happen. I suppose that an update could have happened to something, somewhere, along the line that made a tweak to have a conflict now.

---

FWIW - We are heavy PEER users (1000+ users with hundreds of PEER nodes), and do not see this issue.

Do you know if your PEER is syncing on save, or only on file close?
Have you contacted PEER for their support on this?

This happened to me back in June when we all took our computers home due to corona virus. We were all on netextender and working remotely. Every so often when i closed a drawing after saving it and then reopen it it would be a corrupt file. It got to the point were I just said forget it and I came back to the office No problems since. I thought it had something to do with my internet connection. I lost one job thankfully I just started on this new job and I didn't have much time into it. If it had happened to a larger job like a school I would have died on the spot.