License delivery maintenance is planned for Saturday, July 26, between 12:00 and 20:00 CEST. During this time, you may experience outages or limited availability across our services, including BIMcloud SaaS, License Delivery, Graphisoft ID (for customer and company management), Graphisoft Store, and BIMx Web Viewer. More details…

Sync utilities and issues with Save operation in ARCHICAD

Haris Matthaiou
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
wp-content_uploads_2019_09_Cloud_sync_utils.jpg

Issue:

ARCHICAD cannot Save a project when that project file is located inside a folder that syncs to a file hosting service (like Dropbox,Google Backup & Sync, etc.)
In some very rare occasions, data loss or file corruption may occur.

Info_18x18.png NOTE: BIMcloud operation is also affected by sync utilities. It is not recommended to sync BIMcloud content with such services.

Reason

ARCHICAD’s Save function is a complicated process that involves generating temporary files, lock files and extended disk I/O operation.
Most popular sync clients have no periodical check for file changes and try to sync whenever a change is detected on a monitored folder. While sync client is inpatient to send the file changes, ARCHICAD is still performing the Save operation. That results in a system lock where ARCHICAD fails to successfully complete the saving sequence of the project file.

Solution

  • Avoid saving ARCHICAD project files inside a folder monitored by a cloud sync utility. If you need to backup project files to such service, use third party utility that supports copying/syncing files and folders locally with scheduling features. That way you may schedule a folder synchronization job between your ARCHICAD projects folder and a backup folder inside the monitored folder of a file hosting service.
    There are dozens of third-party options for such tasks. As an example, .FreeFileSync Open Source application is quite popular and supports such workflows
  • If you insist on saving directly to a monitored folder of a file hosting service, make sure that the utility provides a function to disable real-time monitoring and use it before saving ARCHICAD files.

Still looking?

Browse more articles

Back to articles

See latest solutions

Accepted solutions

Start a new discussion!