Project Files on BIMcloud and Teamwork

[Grubenstein]

Hi All, 

As an office we have recently upgraded to the full version of Archicad from Solo. We are placing all of our projects on the BIMcloud but are having issues with how long it taking to open projects work on them and then release all etc. 

My question is

1. Do all projects uploaded to the BIMcloud need to be Teamwork projects. The reality is that the main feature of the full version that we wanted was the Hotlink facilty. In reality we rarely work on a project file at the same time using the teamwork function. So all the baggage that comes with this we are having to deal with (reserving and releasing the file, creating snapshots etc) which is slowing us down. But we are not getting the benefits as we don't work on files at the same time 

2. I know you can upload PLN files and use them from the BIMcloud but that comes with issues such as they are not visible within the folder unless you open and download them. If we want to incrementally save a pln we cant as we have to re-upload every save and overwrite the original uploaded file. 

Wanted to sound this out to see if there might be something we are missing, but at present its making working on files take longer than it should. The perfect scenario would be most files are PLN with Hotlinks where required and we could incrementally save the PLN on the BIMcloud with CTRL S or File save 

Interest to know everyones thoughts.

Thanks 

Kevin 

[Barry Kelly]

You don't need to use BIMCloud at all if you don't want to.

I have never used it.

If all of your PLN or hotlink files are on your local drive or a shared network drive, then that is all you need.

Just save them as regular PLN or hotlimk (MOD) files and open them directly from that drive.

Barry.

[Grubenstein]

Hi Barry, 

We can't unfortunately as our office uses Sharepoint and it was creating a massive issue as everytime ArchiCAD autosaved it created backups and the storage size went thru the roof. Hence why now our ArchiCAD files are on the BIMCloud. 

the only alternative would of been a separarte drive for the files which we set to back up to share point say at the end of the day each day to avoid the autosave multiple back up issues. 

I just wonder if there is a smarter way of using BIMCloud

[Barry Kelly]

Does your office have a network server that you can all access the files from?

I would save the files there and make sure the server is backed up at regular intervals.

I let our IT department worry about that, but I guess that depends on the size of the company you work for.

Only one person at a time can access the file because of the LCK file when someone opens it.

I wouldn't be relying on Sharepoint to synchronise folders across all users in your company.

Barry.

[Grubenstein]

Hi Barry, 

No we do not as we switched to SharePoint some time ago, but it is of course an option. We are a small business (12 people)

As my post suggests above. Might be we need a project drive in the office that backs up to sharepoint at the end of the day when no-one is using ArchiCAD. 

Just wondered if there was a way to Use BimCloud as its also a more cost effective method of storing the project files and if we do use teamwork on a project then everything is in the same place (shame PLN cant just be incrementally saved to it, seems like a missed oppourtunity to make it the single location for all files)

Kevin 

[jamesMorris]

We just use BimCloud Basic for everything. 

Then back it up to a cloud. I guess you could do the same with Sharepoint

[Lingwisyer]

We transitioned to Sharepoint a few years ago and found it too slow to work on, so we added a NAS that syncs to it instead. There is still the issue of Sharepoint versioning which murders your storage quota even if you are not constantly syncing the NAS... And since you are syncing the NAS rather than a users computer, you lose the ability to track access via Sharepont. I am hoping that MS updates their versioning and lets you granulate the versioning settings which would resolve a fair bit of the storage woes.

Ling.

[jamesMorris]

Yeah, these Cloud drives are all dead slow, no matter if Sharepoint, Dropbox or GDrive. 

However, this isn't really an issue how we are using it. 

Maybe it was not clear enough on how we use it in combination with Cloud. 

All projects are in BimCloudBasic. 

BimCloudBasic runs on a Windows Server. 

Projects make use of the integrated Snapshots, so you have some kind of protection against user error right there. 

It isn't perfect for two reasons. 

First one, default is only every 4h and you have to change that on a project basis.

Second, the user still has to send data to the server. Just recently has a user crashing ArchiCAD without any recovery files or nothing. Was lucky that by pure luck 15min before that happened, there was a Snapshot. But since the user has not sent data for the last 3h, that Snapshot did of course not contain her work.

So right up until now, data has not touched any slow cloud. All data is stored on the local SSDs of the server.

This makes IMHO working with Graphisoft as fast as possible, same as just having PLN files stored on a network drive. Definitely faster than having PLN files stored on a Cloud Drive like Sharepoint, where the file has to be downloaded or synced first.

I am not sure what version of BimCloud @Grubenstein is using, and why he is experiencing a Teamwork baggage. Sure it might be a little bit slower to open at first than a PLN file, but after that Teamwork is basically the same as using a local PLN file (because it is only using local cached files to work with). Saving might be even faster for bigger projects, since you only incrementally upload. 

At the end of the day, we do a full backup of the BimCloud Basic. 

For that we stop BimCloud Services, then copy all the files from BimCloud installation path A to Backup destination path B.  

Unlike the original backup script from Graphisoft, we don't daily delete B and copy everything over from A.

Instead we robocopy mirror the data from A to B. That way only changed or new files need to be written. This saves  a lot of unnecessary writes. It is still a mirror, so stuff that was deleted on A will be also deleted on B. 

So what you end up with is a daily full backup on path B.

This contains no versioning, so you can't go back to the state from a week ago. If you want that, you would need to use a filesystem based versioning or maybe your Cloud has some kind of versioning. ZFS for example offers snapshots, Windows also has some kind of VSS versioning, I believe even integrated into Windows Server Backup, or for example Dropbox offers between 30d and 1y of file versioning (that is of course not counted against your quota, I am pretty surprised that this is supposedly not the case with SharePoint!).

Of course we don't do that manually but use the script I wrote:

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Teamwork-BIMcloud/Backup-Script-for-BIMcloud-Basic-2025/m-p/6842...

Hope this helps answering your questions. If not, we need a better understanding of your current workflow and what problems you encounter with that.