BIM Server Temp/ObjectContents directory became too large

[matjashka]

Hello,
I hope somebody could advise.
One of the storage drives on our office server died. During the process of restoring our projects from the backup, I noticed that the other HD with the filesystem and Applications grew extremely large. BIM server was down most of this time, because it caused issues beyond the scope of this post.

A quick research showed me to the Graphisoft folder, and BIM server modules. On our recent system backup, the temporary files take around ~1.5GB at max. On the working system, they grew to ~40-50GB EACH (for module 1400 and 1500) basically without any reason!

Could anyone tell me if it's safe to shut down the BIM server and just manually delete those temporary files to free up space? The HD became almost full and we can't continue to use it like this.

Thanks much!

[NCornia]

Matt,

Deleting files manually is not recommended unless you know exactly what the result will be. I recommend that you first open all Teamwork projects in their respective versions and save a .PLN. Then go to the BIM Server Control Center; open the Manager and export all of your projects that are still active as .BIMProject files. Then you can use the Manager to delete all projects from the BIM Server. Once your BIM Server is Empty of projects, choose the Create>Import from File option in the Projects page of the Manager to re-import only Active projects.

If you have any dormant users in a project make sure they leave or force them to leave the project. The BIM Server will keep logs of changes waiting for users to sync their copies. If a user joins a project early on and then does nothing in the project or weeks or months the logs will grow and grow until the user does a Send/Receive or leaves the project.

Lastly try to keep the number of projects and modules in your BIM Server to a minimum. Only active projects should be in the BIM Server. Completed projects or projects, you should save a .PLN or .PLA to archive and then it can be re-shared easily when it is needed again. If you have 3 modules i.e. 17, 16 and 15 then you should make every effort to retire the 15 module. You could even install the 15 module in its own machine, separate from the others. But the less moving parts the easier things are to manage.

I hope this helps. Best regards,

[matjashka]

Years later, I stumbled upon the same problem, and ... found my own post. Sounds like I'm the only one who has this problem! 🙂

For the record, if anyone needs the correct answer:

The large files saved in the Temp directory are created when an Administrator exports a Teamwork project from the BIMcloud server.

The file is then immediately downloadable by the user, but the files in the Temp directory are not sanitized after that happens, at least not immediately. So, if you're exporting a lot of large projects on one day, the Temp folder may grow to tens of GB and successfully clog up up your storage space.

The temporary files may be deleted without any damage to your project database. You can watch them being created during export and their size corresponds with the size of the file you download after export.

HTH.