Revit - Best practice - Central model

[thomas.holth425274]

Hi

There is a discussion at the office at how to manage the central model file and how to do backups. Some like to make in incremental copy of the central file and let all the users make new local copies of the new central file. Then the old central file becomes a backup and all users must make new local files. I like to do backups by just take copy of the central file to a backup folder. Then the users are not forced to make new local files and the central file remains the same.

I notice that it is recommended to recreate the central file every know and then. Does anybody know why? Does it really reduce crashes? By recreate the central file the file size is also reduced. Has anybody noticed any substantial reduction? Does it increase model performance?

And, when you do an audit I see on a blog post that you should make a new central file it's done. Is this important? If I don't, will the audit be reverted?

Regards,
Thomas Holth

[david_peterson]

Here's my 2 cents worth of experience.
On re-creating central files.....
I do it about once a month, or less depending on how many users I have working in it as well as file performance and stability. I've had a central file be really slow to respond at times, file size wasn't big and I was the only one in it. After a day of "dealing" with it, I finally recreated the central file, deleted all local back-ups and started with a clean new local file. (It should be noted that as a general practice I always, always, always, use the create new local and audit options every time I open a file). The difference was night and day. My file was working as I would expect to. Nice, fast and stable. From my understanding even creating new locals without deleting the local back-ups can bring gremlins back into your file (at least that's what our reseller told us). So I would say if your file is running fine, there's not much of a reason to create new centrals, but if it starts getting laggy or just running slower than you think it should be, create a new central and delete all the old stuff.
Other standard stuff we do.....
It's standard, recommended practice in our firm to create new locals every time you open, close and re-create new locals over lunch. This empties out your local cache files and frees up a ton of ram since revit seems to keep a running account of what you've done. Every 2 weeks it's recommended to delete all local files and back-ups and create new ones.
Also recommended to audit when you open, every time. This may be a little overkill, but even if you're doing it when just opening locals, it will save those "fixes" back to the central when you save.
Purge the central file.... Selectively after DDs to get rid of unused junk.... purge all after CD's.....
Delete unused views.....Selectively after DD's and get rid of unused sheets, and non-working and coordination views after DD's....
Delete unplaced rooms.... This is a big one... I had a project that was in the "Design" for a little over 2yrs with starts, stops and redesign without anyone watching what the file size was doing or dealing with performance issues. I did a selective purge and deleted unused rooms. Took the file from a little over 400mb down to 280mb. A lot of it was the 1200 unplaced rooms.
Those are just a few things you can do to keep your model running smooth.

I should also note that I don't worry about back-up files at all. Our IT staff has done an amazing job of setting up a great disaster recovery program where by every night they take a snap shot of any file that's been changed and keep those for 60 days. I can go back 60 days and get any file at that point it time!
This doesn't take into account all the "Archive" files I keep when we either issue a Deliverable or a milestone or if we have a major design change. Just incase we want to go back to that point in time.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any other questions.