Prevent Drawing Corruption

[murray-clack]

Hi There....  I am still relatively new to the Civil 3D game, and so far, I haven't had any major issues.

But, within my company, and cad community, I sometimes hear of people having corrupt Civil 3D drawing files.

I was wondering if there is a "best practice" method to prevent and/or minimize this from happening (i.e. In addition to running the Audit and Purge commands).  

For example, at the end of each day, or after major design changes, would it be wise to XMLOUT the entire file as a backup?

[Jay_B]

We have not experienced drawing corruption issues any more so than with plain AutoCad. There's normally the AutoCad .bak file that can be used if a drawing goes bad in addition to whatever server backup files your company may have on a network so worst case we could loose up to a day of work in theory in our environment.
Problems can be minimized by splitting up your workflow into multiple drawings such as.
a. Points base file with eg surface
b. Alignment, layout profile, corridor
c. Cross sections
d. Pipe networks
etc.

Data shortcuts also keep the file sizes down and allow for effective sharing of the data amongst the project team.

Hope this helps.

[troma]

In addition to what Jay said, we will also save an archive copy of the drawing before a major design change. You're already onto Audit & Purge.

[ishkav]

If you would use Vault, then I think you would take advantage of the versioning that comes with it, so no issues. Otherwise you could use free versioning software like Autover, this way having a full working backup of the original file with every save that can be restored at any time.

[ishkav]

Also a good place to start is to look at the best practices guide. Look below for example, since it is integrated with the Civil 3D Help.

http://docs.autodesk.com/CIV3D/2013/ENU/index.html?url=filesCBP/GUID-394E4463-964C-4233-BC27-5ECB5B0...