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Thread: Archiving Projects

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Replies: 6 - Last Post: Oct 29, 2008 2:44 PM Last Post By: kyleb_[autodesk]

chriswade

Posts: 173
Registered: 10/06/08

Archiving Projects
Posted: Oct 24, 2008 10:31 PM

It is our company policy to archive projects whenever they are submitted to the client or building department, with regular AutoCAD files totaling about 30 Megs per project this has not been an issue; however, with the project we are currently working on totaling 310 MB, this would add up fast. So my questions are:

Does your company have a similar standard?

If so how do you archive your Revit Projects?

When we Archive our projects we want them to remain exactly as we sent the drawings out.

Wanderer

Re: Archiving Projects
Posted: Oct 28, 2008 6:59 PM

in response to: chriswade

Might it not be a good idea (in at least some cases) to simply archive
say, a set of PDF's that represent the paper plots in those instances,
and set up other, more widely spaced, backups for the model itself?

cwade@breeneng.com wrote:

It is our company policy to archive projects whenever they are submitted
to the client or building department, with regular AutoCAD files
totaling about 30 Megs per project this has not been an issue; however,
with the project we are currently working on totaling 310 MB, this would
add up fast. So my questions are:
Does your company have a similar standard?
If so how do you archive your Revit Projects?

When we Archive our projects we want them to remain exactly as we sent
the drawings out.

chriswade

Posts: 173
Registered: 10/06/08

Re: Archiving Projects
Posted: Oct 28, 2008 7:09 PM

in response to: Wanderer

Actually I don't have control over how often we are to backup the files, just the method used to back them up and in all reality there have been several occasions where those backups have saved us a ton of time (for example the Architect changes their backgrounds and the owner doesn't like it, but in the mean time the backgrounds were sent to us to work on, well now they have to change them back, by Archiving we can easily get our old work back, without spending the excess time).

arcticad

Posts: 887
Registered: 06/21/04

Re: Archiving Projects
Posted: Oct 28, 2008 8:16 PM

in response to: chriswade

Projects are backed up each time a submittal is made.

PDF files are made and copies of the project are made into a zip.

Hard Drives are cheap and you can get an Iomega 120 Gig Rev disk to backup your files.

chriswade

Posts: 173
Registered: 10/06/08

Re: Archiving Projects
Posted: Oct 28, 2008 8:26 PM

in response to: arcticad

Well, 120 GB drive wouldn't help too much, for one project it's not too bad, but this is a small project and the project is now up to about 500 MB, now, we are talking about 20 submittals per project, so we are talking 10 GB per small project, a larger project with more floors and more buildings (sometimes as many as 10 buildings, so that would multiply by 10) which means one large project per hard drive or 12 small ones per hard drive (at 120 GB), this is not going to be accepted by my boss, not quite sure how this should be handled. And this doesn't count any DWFs or PDFs that need be archived as well.

arcticad

Posts: 887
Registered: 06/21/04

Re: Archiving Projects
Posted: Oct 29, 2008 4:48 AM

in response to: chriswade

It's a simple problem. How much time and money would you spend if you had to rebuild your project.

Buy more hard drives and back them up and take them home.

The advantage to a Rev Disk is there are no electronics on the disk to break.

Obviously you would buy multiple 120 GB disks.

You can buy a changer if you really want and stack 8 disks in it.

(They only go up to 70 GB for the changers)

What I do is run a mirror program (Vice Versa) to a computer just for backup.

Also provides an archive of changes.Then I'll run the backup to multiple disks.

Do a Full backup once a month and the incremental or differential backups for the rest.

Differential Backups are much easier to restore. but you use more space.

kyleb_[autodesk]

Posts: 939
Registered: 10/21/05

Re: Archiving Projects
Posted: Oct 29, 2008 1:45 PM

in response to: arcticad

You make a good point here. Storage is very cheap these days. You can 1 Terabyte NAS for $350...not exactly gonna break the bank. It'll take a lot of projects to fill that sort of thing.

If you want to go to the next step, I'd recommend using a service like JungleDisk, which leverages Amazon's S3 web infrastructure. Unlimited storage on Amazon's stable, secure, well backed up set of web clusters. $0.17/month/GB isn't all that expensive for that kind of piece of mind. I use it for personal backup and it's a great service. S3 is also what we use for Autodesk Seek, since Amazon has built such a scalable infrastructure.

Cheers,

Kyle B

Sustainable Design Product Manager

P.S. This discussion resulted in a blog post on this subject.

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