All construct xrefs disappeared suddenly

[Anonymous]

Hello,

My team and I are working on a project with over 100 sheets. Today, we discovered that all of our views had a problem: most construct xrefs had been detached over night (and by detached I mean detached, not just unreferenced). No one actively went into the views to detach our constructs, so it must have been an error or glitch of some sort. 

My only idea is that it could have had something to do with a batch publish to PDF as that was the only time in the last 24 hours all sheets were accessed.

Has anyone encountered this problem before, or have any idea as to why this may have happened?

Any solutions available?

[john.vellek]

Hi @Anonymous,

I see that you are visiting as a new member to the AutoCAD forum. Welcome to the Autodesk Community!

 What kind of storage are you using on your network?  Does your network implementation involve DFS?  The only other case I located so far that looks similar involved a DFS share.

What version of AutoCAD are you using? Are there any third-party add-ins or products involved?

[Anonymous]

Hi @john.vellek,

Yes, I believe our servers involve some type of implementation of DFS, but I would have to check with our IT to verify. (I know however that our servers "talk" to Egnyte and share files in that way, sending copies of files back and forth).

We are using AutoCAD Architecture 2016, and as far as I know we do not have any third party add-ins. 

[massimo.corradi]

If I understood you well, since you are talking about 'views', you are working with a project navigator?

In that case that happens when constructs are not 'contextualized' (they are not qualified as levels in PN) but are attached manually into the views.

Those references are then detached if someone triggers a 'refresh project' by renaming or moving constructs and elements, or activating the refresh button directly.

Using correctly level context and making new views by hooking the constructs as presented in PN does never lead to the loss of references in views.

We use that 'non contextualized' mode for projects that do not want to use the 3D functionality of the PN. Our counter-measure is to set views files to read-only. Excluded when changes need to be done. For that we also delete the RPQ (repath queue) file in the PN folder first to avoid to trigger repath.

[Victoria.Studley]

Hi @Anonymous,

It looks like @john.vellek and @massimo.corradi have provided a couple of explanations for what might be going on here.

To start with, you may want to:

• Restore the backup (BAK) files for any affected drawings, to see if you can salvage a copy of the files where the Xrefs are still intact.
• Make sure all team members are attaching Xrefs by dragging them from Project Navigator in the View drawings, and not attaching them manually via the XREF Manager.
• Check for file corruption in all Constructs, Elements, Views, Sheets, and Templates.
• Make sure your projects are stored and accessed in a supported network environment.

I'll add the following information to provide you with a bit more context:

• I've seen this happen under the conditions that @massimo.corradi has described.
• I've also seen the Constructs lose their Xref path and display as "Not Found", due to users attaching them as Xrefs manually instead of dragging and dropping them via Project Navigator, even if they are added as Constructs via the recommended workflow and associated with Levels.
• This also may occur if you're working in an unsupported network environment (DFS, cloud storage solutions like Egnyte which you mentioned, etc.).

Here are some resources you may find helpful as you look into the root cause:

• Xref in View drawing not found in AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD MEP (Your issue is similar, and you might check the XMLs in a backup copy of the project from before the Constructs detached to determine if they were attached properly to begin with.)
• Autodesk support for Distributed File System (DFS) (There are additional links at the bottom of this article that may also be relevant to your situation.)

I hope this helps you get to the root of what's happening here.

If one or more of these posts helped answer your question, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

[Victoria.Studley]

Hi @Anonymous,

I'm just checking in again to see if you need more help with this. Did the information I provided on Friday help you with this issue?

If so, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

[Anonymous]

Hi  @Victoria.Studley, @massimo.corradi, @john.vellek,

Thank you all for the support.

As of now I'm thinking that the most likely answer has to do with our use of DFS. We do not have 'non contextualized' drawings, and always pull from the project navigator. In either case, I will relay these responses to my team to ensure we avoid this problem in the future.

Thank you, again!

Mariana

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I spoke to some people who seem to have encountered these issues previously. They too believe it could be an issue with DFS/Egnyte.

They had been able to resolve most if not all of their issues by unchecking the “automatic save” and “backup copy” features in “options”.

Figured this might be helpful to someone in the future.

[daniel.jentsch]

Hello,

Our company just went through this same issue and we do NOT use any kind of DFS networking.  I believe the majority of our xrefs are placed from the Project Navigator, though we may need to, on occasion, insert an xref from within the xref manager that is not in the project.

We are still working in AutoCAD Architecture 2016 for now and have a number of machines running Win 10 and Win 7.

This has only happened once (yesterday) and we were forced to go back through the .BAK files to find which xrefs were inserted where, and manually replace.  Though everything is back up and running, this caused the loss of several hours, and one or two elevated heart-rates...

I'm wondering if anyone has looked into this any further.  Since we're not using a DFS networking system, none of us here are particularly enthused about disabling the Auto Save option...