Revit Backup Location change

[Anonymous]

Hi I'm the IT support person for a large engineering company (multidisciplinary) that has 4 locations around QLD Australia. All the data is synchronized between the 4 locations via a product called SureSync. This issue I have with 50 odd engineers working in Revit it automatically creates backups in the form filename.versionnumber.rvt i.e. building.001.rvt, building.002.rvt and so on based on the maximum backup count set be each engineer. my issue is purely management of these files as they are saved in the same location as the original file. this is causing grief as the Sync software then syncs to the 3 other locations and as you can imagine with 50 engineers this adds up to 10's of GB of superfluous data slowing down the syncing of critical data waiting to be worked on at another location.

So my 1st question is can you set the location of these auto backups to another location i.e. not in the folders being synced and if not can you turn off this feature. We have 15min ShadowProtect backups so files can always be restored if they want an earlier version plus they have a read only archive directory that keeps the last 25 versions of every file. so these auto backups are not required and causing  me an IT nightmare to manage the bandwidth between sites. any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

[Corsten.Au · Accepted solution]

Hi

1. If you can filter those back up files and block their sync, then it will help you save storage space taking up those unwanted files.

2. Usually companies run a script to clean up those file before taking backup, in your case its getting sync /mirror almost all the time so

this wont help much.

3. There are Revit plugins which can help move the backup location..

(  It allows to move the backup files created by Revit (.0001.rvt for example) in a sub-directory named Backup or a common directory )

Cheers!

[Sahay_R]

It sounds as though there is not a central server or collaboration through the cloud happening! Collaboration creates a local file as a back up - that is it.

For working on an independent model, it is possible to save the maximum number of backups to the minimum through Saveas Options.

[ToanDN]

Try this app:
https://apps.autodesk.com/RVT/en/Detail/Index?id=4970299609340791742&appLang=en&os=Win64

[Anonymous]

I managed to add -*.0*.rvt to the exclude list and it appears to be working.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hi

a followup on your response "not using a central server or collaboration through the cloud". there us a new engineer that has started and he has instructed the other engineers that they all can work in the same Revit Project at the same time. this is causing files the locked were no one can access the project until the sync to the other servers are finished. It is my understanding that this is not best practice and can lead to corruption in the projects unless a Revit Application Workstation Server or Revit Server on larger sites to manage the sharing and the updating of the files.

Can you please advise if what the Engineer is insisting is a feature of individual installations of Revit in a domain enviroments

Thanks

Dennis

[Anonymous]

I would recommend using *.000*.RVT instead, backups usually have 3 zeros. If the actual Revit file has a date it could be deleted too

[ralvarez1976]

As an alternative, you could work in another folder and use a software like freefilesync

This allows you to schedule the syncing of one folder to another with robust filters. You could filter your Revit backup files out of the mirrored folder, and then point Goggle Drive to sync with that folder, instead of the original location.

[HENRYHUIJBERS3172]

Yes I do know that plugin (Backup file orginizer), but it doesn't go beyond Revit 2020.