moving set of Architectural drawings into next stage- best way?

Last time i moved drawings from 'sketch design' into 'design development' i manually moved the drawings into a new folder and had to re-xref everything. This was time consuming as it required me to note which layers were frozen as re-xreffing reseted layer status.

If anyone could help me with the best way (least time consuming, and most reliable) of updating a drawing set into a new stage it would be much appreciated

cheers

Is this for large Commercial projects? For different phases of projects in our office, we just copy the plans off to the side and add a date.

We do residential, so keeping track of phases is very easy.

Yeah it's for largish commercial projects.. We copy to side and add a date within a stage but when moving from one stage to the next the file name in the file root changes. Filing system used by office strangely overlooks this pretty important part of working.

We have an okayy general CAD protocol just not for this manouvre.

This likely will not help you now, but in the future, if you do this it will save time.

When you insert your xref, you have options that you can pick for the 'file type'. Typically its defaulted to 'Full Path', which is where the xref is referenced. You have another option of 'Relative Path', which should do what you are describing. (See Image)

'Relative Path' allows for you to move your files to a new location and keep your xref paths still intact. (I do this all the time.) A few things to keep in mind though. You must save your drawing BEFORE you insert your xref, otherwise you will not be able to set it to 'Relative Path'. The other thing is that you need to use the command 'XA' to get the dialogue box, and not the command 'XREF'.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and as far as I know you can only add the relative path when you attach the xref.