Library Management

[Yvonne]

What's the best place to store/link ArchiCAD Migration Libraries? 

Is it better to keep it on the BIMcloud or link it from the local disk?

[Yvonne]

What's the best place to store/link ArchiCAD Migration Libraries? 

Is it better to keep it on the BIMcloud or link it from the local disk?

[Nathan Hildebrandt · Accepted solution]

It depends on your project. The Migration Libraries are part of the standard install for Archicad. Depending on the projects you are working on, as stand-alone or Teamwork it might make a small difference. But in all circumstances, I use local C drive installs for my projects. On a Teamwork project, the libraries will load to BIMcloud. But I wouldn't be using those libraries for stand-alone projects.

[psmith]

All of our projects and libraries are stored on the BIMcloud on our server in the office.

The discussion with Yvonne came about for two reasons...

• the archicad libraries are getting larger and larger with each version and the 'checking libraries' seems to be slowest part of opening a project - particularly when working remotely.
• when we migrated libraries to a new version we found that archicad by default would delete our bim server version of the migrated libraries and default library and replace it with the local version.

I was wondering if there are any speed advantages - particularly when working remotely - by it using the local vs the BIMcloud versions.

Note: Non standard libraries would remain on the BIMcloud

[Nathan Hildebrandt]

When on Teamwork and working remotely all libraries live on BIMCloud except for embedded libraries. Then when you first join the project, the project will be downloaded together with all of the required libraries to the client (user's C drive). Anytime there are changes to the libraries on the BIMCloud then those changes will then be pushed to the client (user's C drive) on the next Receive or Send/Receive command.

If you are using a standalone PLN file and you are working remotely I would always use local libraries where possible. The only issue you may face are practice or project based libraries that need to be centralised so that multiple people within the office can access them. An alternative approach to BIMCloud for libraries (note this isn't a recommended approach) could be to put your libraries onto Dropbox or similar and then have dropbox installed on your users computer for them to load into the project. Noting that corruption could occur if people are accessing the libraries when people are making changes to it. So you need to be ultra careful.

Hope some of the above helps Peter.