Thursday 5 September 2013

Local File – Overwrite or Append Timestamp?

To miss-quote Shakespeare…”To Overwrite or to Append Timestamp, that is the Question!”

You may often receive this message when creating a new local File and wondered what it really means.



Here is an explanation…

Overwrite existing file: All the backup files for that local file get deleted. Helps keep your computer hard drive space free.

Append Timestamp: Another Backup of the local file is created allowing you to develop an archive copy of the project locally.

My recommendation is to always create a new local file when you first open the project first thing in the morning. This helps keep problems with work sharing to a minimum. During the day as you work on the project it may be ok to append timestamp.

Basically your “Local File” is a temporary file while you’re working on the project, you make changes then push “Sync” back to the central file.


Remember… Sync often and create a new local file every day.

Sc

8 comments:

  1. is there a way to change the format of the timestamp? Instead of day/month/yearr I want year/month/day

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  2. The time stamp is a "computer system" time stamp, you can change it by adjusting the date format to the Year/ Month/ Day configuration. But this would be changing it this for your entire system not just Revit.

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  3. I'm not sure how creating a new local file prevents problems with worksharing. Can you explain? We had this discussion at a previous firm and we agreed to go the "append timestamp option" because it archives the model for future reference. This has saved our butts a few times when work was done incorrectly and we could copy old geometry and replace the incorrect geometry.

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    Replies
    1. In fact, both things that you say are the same, you create a new local file, and append a timestamp to the previous one. That's exactly the recommended procedure.

      Now the problem comes after some months working on the same Revit project. The Revit local folder gets full of unsorted backups. In my firm, the IT desk would surely not let me change the system date format (and I don't know if I would like to do it anyway).

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  4. The problem is that when I need to open a backup file from "C:\REVIT_LOCAL\", everything is a mess, for the suffix are "_01Oct2015_160858_backup". Do you simply leave it as is?

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  5. does anyone know how to bring the append time stamp as we are not getting

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  6. Binu, do you mean on the actual printed title block?

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