TIP: How to repair a corrupt PLN file

[Anonymous]

Here is a tip I learned from Tech Support the other day to recover a corrupt file. In fact, we have tried it on a Teamwork file that was giving us problems for more than a week (one team member crashed every time he would send & receive).

This method is called Forward Merging and simply merges the "corrupt" file into a new & reset file.

1. Create a New & Reset file in ArchiCAD
2. Delete all layers from this file and save it. We used the name crashmerge.pln
3. Open your "corrupt" file and select File->Merge and select the crashmerge.pln file to merge.
4. Save your file

That's it! This is much easier than merging all of your data into a new & reset file and it seems to work. One thing to note is that apparently (per tech support) you must save your Teamwork files out to solo PLNs before doing this procedure and then re-share it afterward.

I hope this helps you guys as much as it did us!


Cheers,

[Laszlo Nagy]

I have found this topic as I was searching for "forward merge".
The only thing I would add is that if you had 2D things manually drawn in Sections, Elevations, etc., those will not transfer with a Forward Merge. However, you can copy-paste these between the two files.
Also, Views will not be merged so you would have to recreate them, and probably some other settings won't transfer either, only the geometry.
However, this is still a good solution, especially compared to having to work with a crashing, buggy file.

Also, ARCHICAD 17 and later have the "Open & Repair File" checkbox in the Open File Dialog, so that would be the first thing to try. If that does not repair the corrupt file, then the forward merge method can come.