Purged family types. Need types back

[GGDmep]

Forgive me if this has already been posted about, I could not find anything nor do I really have a lot of time to search. On one of our projects someone in our office purged the model, as you can imagine this deleted a lot of unused family types that we still need. I thought it would be a matter of loading in the families again but it seems Revit won't bring in all the types, leaving only the ones that weren't purged. Does anyone know any way to bring in all those family types? I'd rather not have to go thru and remake all the types again and deleting the family instances, purging and reloading the family is out of the question. If anyone knows anything that could help, it would be greatly appreciated.

[L.Maas · Accepted solution]

I have been in a situation like this when I was on a deadline. What I finally did was.

Rename the families in the project which you have to reload with the purged types.

Lets say you  "ValveA"  in your project were a lot of types have been purged from and will not reload.

Rename this family (e.g "ValveA X").

Now load your original family "ValveA" with all the types from your library. 

So in your project you have basically two of the same families "ValveA" and "ValveA X". The "ValveA" family should have all the types in it.

You can continue modelling with the types from ValveA. 

In your project you have now some valves based on Family "ValveA X". At a later time you can do a select and replace items from the family ValveA X to the the ValveA family. After that you can delete the ValveA X family.

Maybe still quite some work but prevents deleting components from the project.

What also sometimes helps is the following:

Open your family from your library. Make a minor change to the family, a change to one of the other family types might be enough.

From the family do a "load into project". If everything goes well you get the question to "overwrite the existing version". After you do this most of the times all of the types will be added to the family in the project.

[tbrown6608]

I guess that works well enough. I'll try making a change to the family and reloading it but if not I'll rename and reload the family. Thanks!

[kennedydrafting34PYG]

Thanks - Opening the family in the library and then loading worked great.  I just renamed a type, saved, changed the name back, saved and reloaded.