I thought this would be an easy one, but apparently not (for me).
I am looking for guidance on where I can look to removing materials from AutoCAD entities. I believe this to be the source of some of our file-size problems, but I am not certain yet.
We have XREFs from other vendors that are pulled into our drawings with useless (to us) materials. As soon as those XREFs are added, OUR drawings then have the materials within them making the files large (5MB). You can purge the materials (drawing size drops from 5MB to about 200kb), but the next time you open them, the materials come back (and the file size hops back up to 5MB). I don't seem to know how to even manually remove materials from these XREF drawings (or even find the entities that have them), so I have nowhere to start with attacking it with LISP.
The reason I'm doing this is to conserve space on our servers, which conserves space on our backups, which gives us longer timelines for going back in time. We have literally millions of drawings (we have merged with many companies), a non-insignificant number of them with this issue. I have already created a program that opens the file, purges regapps, saves it, then re-sets the file date to the old date ... and I've saved about 1TB (significant for us) in just our archive files. I want to repeat this for materials, hoping to save another 500GB (probably optimistic) because we are moving to a new backup scheme and these savings are worth it for us (small company).
Can this be done?
