what you and I do are worlds apart you have thousands of files my part is less then 100. I would not even dream of doing what I do here where you are. Just saying that it was easy for us here is all and works quite well.
Okay follow me close on this one, nobody called me on it before so I'm thinking it was missed.
I still have one guy working one model at a time, just like you. If it makes sense for me touching thousands of files (one at a time by one guy at a time) it makes sense for you working one file at a time.
believe me when I tell you that I would love to do these stores only once, just not the nature of this beast though.
You guys have trained your clients to do that to you because you haven't made it cost them enough to change.
Retail is fanatical about being "up to date" between permit and grand opening there are no less then 3 milestones built into the process for making changes to the store layout. There was one occasion where they were saw cutting the floor 10 days before grand opening to get a specific shelving unit in a specific spot.
Make it cost 'em and they'll quit doing that.
Back to keeping the old files, how do you handle the multitude of background XREF's that continue to change as the design progresses? Do you lock those as well? What do you do when part of it reverts and part doesn't? And what of all the files that use these files as xrefs? Sounds like a hairball to me, or you avoid using these extremely productive tools to avoid the hairball, again, seems counter-productive.
We don't save xref paths so we can get away with it quite easily since all of the files are in a single folder (named specifically to maintain at least some organization). This would not work out so well for the folks in other departments here but saving relative paths and copying the folder structure would work just as well, but again their needs may be different from mine.
To save the old revision you need to freeze all xrefs used in that revision at that same point. To recover that revision means you'd have to recover all the xrefs that revision used, which may not be possible without overwriting valid subsequent revisions of those files.
Autocad looks in the current folder first. by putting the base files and such in the same folder as the working files, all is good no matter where we are, home, work, laptop on punch list reading of a archive cd a year down the round when they change the layout of the joint. We can get away with this since we do not have tons of files and with a little filename management it is not as cluttered in the folders as one might think.
But all the xrefs have to be frozen at the same point as the revised file you're attempting to save, nothing about that file can change or the file using it as an XREF is no longer frozen. So let's say next week you need to revert back to the older revision, that means any file that file used as an xref must revert to the olde revision as well. That might be okay as long as the rest of that file can revert, but if you need to revert only the South end of the unit but the North end stays at the later release, you're screwed.
think I got the quotes right this time, thanks for bearing with me on that.
Not a problem, I've slopped a dripper once or twice myself.
