Opening Central File Overrides Local Saves`

[josephk79AH5]

I've been saving my cloud drive file throughout the day, but when the file crashed and I reopened the central file expecting the "recover local file?" prompt, the central file oversaved my collaboration cache, and all my work was gone. Why does opening a file delete its latest saved version, and whats the point in saving if it doesn't actually save?

[SteveKStafford]

Saving throughout the day should mean synchronizing with central, not saving changes to your local file only (save diskette icon). When you crashed you'd need to browse to and open your local file, not the central file. The local file might not be able to open if the crash was severe enough.

FWIW, I never save locally except as part of synchronizing with central's own process (saves local before sync and then afterward). If my session had crashed after my last sync I'd only lose what I did between the crash and the last successful sync.

[josephk79AH5]

But whats the point in saving locally then?

[RSomppi]

It is a copy of the central file. When working on workshared projects you are never actually in the central model file, you work in the local copy and synch your changes back to the central. Since the save to local happens automatically during the synch process, you don't need to save unless you lose your connection to the central model.

[josephk79AH5]

I guess my point is that it seems counterproductive for the local save file to be overridden whenever you reopen the file through revit. Saving locally doesn't do anything in this situation.

[RSomppi]

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@josephk79AH5 wrote:
I guess my point is that it seems counterproductive for the local save file to be overridden whenever you reopen the file. 

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That's actually the way it is supposed to work. If you have changes in your local file that have not been synchronized, Revit will ask you if you want to save changes. This should only happen if you have lost connection with the central model and could not synch for some reason. If you encounter this on a regular basis, there is something wrong and you may want to audit your workflow to make sure that you are following established best practices.

[SteveKStafford]

In the old days Synchronize with Central (SWC) and Save Local were not all run together by Revit for us, we had to do them ourselves, develop that sequential habit. There is a subtle difference between SWC and the other option to Synchronize Now (SN) which does not open the synchronize workset dialog nor does it relinquish User Worksets, if any were created or borrowed.

Worksharing is a similar to a public library. The central file is the library, Revit is the librarian and our local file is our library card. Worksets are shelves and books are everything in the model. We can borrow books and/or shelves (with all their books). Creating a new element makes us its editor, owner or borrower as does editing any existing element in the model.

When we use Synchronize and Modify Settings (SWC) Revit will:

1. Save our local file first (to preserve any changes we've made to borrowed elements in our local file).
2. Run Reload Latest to pull any changes other people have made. (pull data to us)
3. Save our changes to the central file. (push data from us)
4. Save our local again to keep our file up to date with the changes other people have made as well as those elements we've returned to the library.

We could argue that Save (local) is useful if I want to keep my changes but NOT share them with other people...yet. However, we can't keep that up very long before someone will ask us to relinquish elements, unless we are only creating new elements nobody has even seen yet. We also need to see what other people are doing sooner than later so we'll have to SWC to do that. We could also argue that using Save File (local) is useful IF the SWC process fails (Revit crashes) before the first step of SWC isn't completed first.

The SWC process will take care of the necessary steps any time we intend to save what we've done as well as returning borrowed elements or worksets. SWC frequently is much better than waiting long periods of time to do it. If you prefer to continue using Save and then use SWC that's fine, just don't only use Save for a long period of time before using SWC.

In the future, if you want to open a local file, like after a crash, browse to that file's location and open it, don't browse to the central file.

Edit: In the past we used to open a local file routinely vs opening the central file. Eventually we realized that opening local files also meant that we had to remember to use Reload Latest immediately otherwise people who started working on the model before us might have made changes to the model that our local file is not aware of yet. This was especially troublesome if we didn't work on the project as much as other people. Our local file could become quite stale compared to others. Now it is faster to get started by opening the central file and letting Revit create our new local file as part of the process. It didn't use to do that for us in the past either.