There's a lot more to installing programs than where the files are located. For what it's worth I'd recommend switching up your thinking. Clean up the high performance SSD so there's enough room for the important programs like AutoCAD; you want them on the best performing drive. Move everything else, including temp/junk/etc. to the other drive.
I use Autodesk inventor (sorry if this is unrelated to the topic), and realized the hard way that Autodesk softwares will attempt to install majority of its files on the C drive no matter which path you choose during installation. Inventor users apparently face this problem more frequently because it takes up more than 3x times more space as Autocad. I was told, much like everyone else here that the only way around it is to make space on C drive. What turned out to be a real bummer was when I had to install Autocad on my PC for work purposes too. Having both Autocad and Inventor on the C drive is practically hogging up the whole drive.
So I bought a 3TB external hard drive to back up all of my .dwg files so I could clear up space on my office computer. I have external reference images in the folders I created to attach to my .dwg files and when I open the folders on my external hard drive they are all that is showing up. None of my .dwg files are showing up. Does anyone know why this is? Basically all of the .dwg files I saved on the external hard drive are gone. Could use some help here. About to hit panic mode but I am hopeful someone out there can help!
Are there still your files (in your external hard drive)? If not, that means your drive is fake. Also, try to put them in another hard drive. If you can open them from it, that means the first hard drive you spoke about is fake too.
I tried to make my question as clear as I could. I transferred my .dwg files to the external hard drive from my office desktop computer. No I cannot see them in the location I put them. I did not put them in the wrong place as I created a file on the external hard drive specifically for these drawings. The hard drive is brand new out of the box so there was nothing else on it. No I moved the files from my internal drive to the external, which you dont have to tell me was a mistake. Always back up your backups! Make sense?
If you are absolutely sure that you have the folder options set to display all files and have searched the entire drive to make sure they didn't end up at some other location, you are probably out of luck.
Thats understandable but that isn't my issue. The .dwg files arent showing up in explorer so they simply arent there. Just seems weird that I can transfer any file to my external hard drive accept for .dwg files.
Here is something I did not mention that maybe will better explain my situation. I did not actually "move" the files to the external hard drive. I did a complete "backup" of my desktop hard drive onto the external hard drive. Would that make any difference? I can move the files from my desktop to the external hard drive and they appear just fine. The biggest issue is I have since formatted my desktop hard drive to clear up space for future projects so the original files are completely gone. I think I am SOL.
I downloaded my software on to my desktop C: drive. This drive is not part of our auto back up system. I also need to access the software from other computers in my facility (conference room for example). How can I move this to the drive on my computer that is accessible from other computers as well as being backed up.
Or is your question about installing AutoCAD on an external harddisk and plugin this harddisk on different workstations and run AutoCAD from that drive? In short words: this option is not available (reason: AutoCAD has to install a lot of things in the system folder, in the programs/shared folders, ... and that can't be avoided).
my drives are partiitioned and the C drive is crowded therefore i cant install it there so i select install onto the D drive and it just refuses for me to do so and says C drive is full despite selecting D drive. WHY
No, real file locking works only on network drives with an operating system supporting file locking, but not on cloud services (as they are working with cached copies of files). An AKN article about this can be found >>>here
Autodesk AutoCAD and Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint
Based on this information we made the move and migrated their .dwg files to Sharepoint with the intent of leveraging the One drive sync client to give them the file explorer access they are used to when editing designs. The result however was lost work, and we later stumbled upon this very recent article from Autodesk themselves stating Sharepoint is not a supported storage location for Autocad drawings.
Same DWG file on Sharepoint can be opened multiple times with no read-only alert in AutoCAD (autodes...
The issue here ends up being that in a standard SMB environment with files stored on a server share a user can open up an Autocad file for editing and when subsequent users open the file, they will get a message that another user is editing it, and the file will open in read only mode. With the mechanics of Sharepoint and the one drive sync client neither user is informed the file is open and they can both edit, resulting in multiple out of sync files or lost work for one of the 2 users.
Sharepoint has a check out feature, that SHOULD mitigate this by forcing users to check out the files prior to editing it HOWEVER the checkout feature is not compatible with the One drive sync client and if any user is syncing a library with checkout enabled it will auto-lock ALL files within that directory.
With these concerns taken into consideration Autocad DWG files and Sharepoint are neither integrated nor a workable solution for any real-world scenario other than a single user environment.
Thank you all for your quick response. I will definitely look into Zee drive. it also seems like it advertises overcoming some file size amount and naming limitations that have been a pain point for us when trying to move users to the cloud. I am also finding this CentreStack Software that does the same thing;
An interesting point here is that clients pay big bucks for both Autocad and MS products. MS makes a sync client that can't do what zee drive does, and Autocad also makes products to support cloud file locking that are astronomically priced. From the Website Zee drive seems like a small company and their product is a fraction of what Autodesk is charging AND outperforms One Drive Sync client. Both MS and Autodesk should buy one of these companies out and include these features rather than charging extra. What a customer Dis-service to have to involve a third party to get these products to play right together when you have been advertising since 2019 that they are "integrated". shame on Microsoft.
I tend to clean up my junk but others dont so looking at doing it for them. we have our temp drive set to C:drive i wnat to delete all *.log *.ac$ and *.DWL etransmit etc will leave baks for now in future delete by date.
If you move your ProStructureMaterial.mdb file into network directory you need to edit the directory path in the Main Configuration file. Be sure to remove the one that is installed with the program from your local drive. (C:\ProgramData\Bentley\ProStructures\V8i_S7\PowerProduct\WorkSpace\ProStructures\Localised\USA_Canada)
hard pathing is not dictated by my company, they prefer soft pathing. our IT dept. does keep the drive letters flexible so server migration issues are transparent to the users. if i had to worry about such issues, then softpathing or a routine to go thru all files would be required.
Design your system faster with access to valuable drive information including 3D Building Information Modeling (BIM) files for VLT HVAC Drive FC 102. You can fully document your installation in AutoCAD Revit, to reduce the risk of errors, and save time on system design.
Various CAD Users have different mapped drive letters (Ex: H:\ or S:\ instead of G:).Trying to avoid going around and manually changing the drive letter to match their mapping every time I updated the CUIX file (since path would be overwritten).Would like to use the universal Google Share Drive web based link (by selecting the file and choose "get link" in Google Drive and copy the link).
1.) start using AutoCAD profiles. It's possible write a setup script to create the profile for the user. This profile would contain a support file path entry for the location of your LISP code. The path would vary depending on where the user has google drive mapped to.
2.) load all LISP from the profile when AutoCAD starts up, this can be done with the acaddoc.lsp file.
3.) remove all hard-coded load statements from the CUI buttons
I have created a virtual drive using Windows Cloud Filter API and I see that there is a significant difference in how applications save documents to my drive and to OneDrive. I have recorded a sequence of save operations on my drive and on and OneDrive.
We have a customer recently calling in with the issue that their AutoCAD do not want to save on the c -drive and give the following error message. And could save to any other location successfully. He could also save to the c -drive using MS Word or Excel.
So, although blanket restrictions is a good preventative method you might need to relax it to have AutoCAD be able to save to the c drive, in this case. Alternatively, you can simply save to another folder or directory instead of the c drive root.
Solid State Drives (SSD) technology may be the best choice when looking for an ideal storage configuration for your AutoCAD Workstation. The SSD is not only quick, but it also guarantees fast boot time and responsive workflows. Also, the high speed of SSDs enables your system to boot, launch applications, and load files much faster than any standard hard drive. Importantly, the SSD technology offers an ideal and safe place to install your applications, operating system, and active project files.
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