All views and layout subsets vanish upon opening project

[James Murray]

Yes, all. Poof. The layouts remain, FWIW.

Yesterday afternoon they were there, this morning they're gone. Client meeting in two hours.

Here's the scary part. I restored Tuesday's version of the file from backup. I know this file is OK because I used the views and subsets on Wednesday. But when it opens, it has the sickness.

Which means, the damage is occurring upon opening, not before.

It is a migrated project. But it was migrated several weeks ago, no trouble until now.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[James Murray]

And...

All the masters have their size reset to A1. The drawings are present, but naturally they can't be updated with no views. The publisher sets are gone, but there's nothing to publish anyway.

[Anonymous]

Only the usual things come to mind, which you've probably already tried.

Import/merge into a new file.

Open with the Mactel beta if you have it.

Sounds very bad

[Jefferson]

Good luck with this James. I feel for you.

The rest of us "regular" users will of course be watching closely how you fair. I find it very unerving when someone with your program savvy experiences mystery phenomenon.

[James Murray]

Well, I lived, it's a design development meeting so I only had to resurrect 8 sheets. I imported layouts from my template and limped across the finish line. Fortunately it seems to be only that project affected at this time. The 10-native ones are all alright.

It reinforces my conviction that I won't migrate anything in CDs.

I'm about ready for that hotfix now. This is like an early beta event. Can't have it.

[Anonymous]

Hello James,
I take it that you have concluded that your problems were
caused by something involved in migrating a project
from a previous version in to AC 10.
Is this true ?

My re-seller strongly recommends not to migrate projects into AC 10
as there are too many things that can go wrong.

The New Features guide goes on and on about how to do it
and all of the things to look out for.
That was the tip off for me. Don't try it.

What do you think ?
Peter Devlin

[James Murray]

Peter wrote:
Hello James,
I take it that you have concluded that your problems were
caused by something involved in migrating a project
from a previous version in to AC 10.
Is this true ?

That's what I suspect. I can't prove it until I have a few more migrated sets go up in smoke, while the native 10 ones don't.

My re-seller strongly recommends not to migrate projects into AC 10
as there are too many things that can go wrong.

The New Features guide goes on and on about how to do it
and all of the things to look out for.
That was the tip off for me. Don't try it.

When you think about what it must be doing behind the scenes it's no wonder it's not perfect.

My opinion is, there's no rush. 9 works. If you accept that you can't move everything at once, it follows to let the projects nearest the end to just coast through. Let the CD-phase projects run normally, time flies, they'll be done before you know it.

The big issue with migration is the layouts. That's the freaky trick AC has to do. A project in schematics or DD doesn't have many layouts, so you could even just migrate the model and rebuild the layout book from nothing, thus avoiding the big issue. In CDs, you wouldn't want to do that for a pile of detail sheets etc.

And if you let the CD stuff run, you know that something is predictably making money while you transition. You're not 'experimenting' on everything at once. Management likes that.

My plan is train people on a new model first, then look at migrating a SD/DD project. As time goes on and more kinks are worked out, maybe we can transition projects in more states.

And that's all to the side of the totaled-Navigator-data issue. It's probably a total fluke. (There aren't tons of these stories in this forum.) But it doesn't make me more excited to try a 60-sheet project.

Days like this, you question the wisdom of making everything out of little pieces of electricity...

[Anonymous]

Thank you James,
All very well put.
Peter Devlin

[Aussie John]

Related to the topic, I had a file that would crash archicad when a particular section was loading. I had to go back four days of backups before one would open. That meant that those unopenable files had opened and been worked on before!! That's wierd. It was a converted file BTW.

I was able to merge the latest into a new file and cut and paste all the new plan work. The section notation and details had to be redone. Lucky it was a small job.

Makes you wish for a safe open mode where sections dont load so problems can be tracked down.

[Anonymous]

Aussie wrote:
Makes you wish for a safe open mode where sections dont load so problems can be tracked down.

Perhaps James' auto-update on/off switch would do the trick. Of course not having drawings that cause crashes would be nice.

I also have recently had a section crash my machine (updating it in the layout). I though it might be the Mactel RC1 since the same file seems to work fine in Windows. (I haven't tried the old beta or the PPC version.)