Drawing Size...Help!

i have a major problem with the file size of me drawings, when i recieve the drawings from a 3rd party they are quite small but when i save them after working on them they end up over 50mb i can not fo rth elife of me figure out what is going on, i have tried everything i can think of...purge delete etc but nothing seems to work, one interesting thing is the drawings get bigger when they are saved in older releases of autocad..

any help would be greatly appreciated! its taking minates to just copy something small.

What version are you saving your drawings to (AutoCAD 2004 or something earlier)? What versions are the drawings created in by the third party? Are there any xrefs? You're using plain AC 2004. Does the third party use an AutoDesk vertical product?

My colleague has 2008 but i have 2004, when drawing is saved in 2004 it doubles in size, 3rd party drawings are saved in ac2000, yes when we get the drawings they are in 3d....

When you save a drawing back to an earlier version, it is my understanding that if the drawing contains entities that the earlier version is not 'comfortable' with, it creates proxy entities. This can bloat file size drastically.

AutoDesk vertical products are those that are built around the core of plain AutoCAD with the benefit of additional features targeted at a specific group. Example: AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD Electrical or AutoCAD MEP. Is the 3rd party using any one of these products or another AutoDesk vertical product?

yes the 3rd party are using a autodesk vertical product, i have since wblocked the drawing out deleted everything and purged the drawing and copyied it back in 'using layout tabs' this had reduced the file size from over 80mb to 25mb

Still seems rather high. When you purged the drawing did you also clean out any unused regapps?

unused regapps?

unused regapps?

If you use the command line version of the Purge command by typing -PURGE, (be sure to include the dash), you can purge Regapps.

Regapps = Registered Applications

These can cause drawings to become bloated.

Your problem is that in the default settings of AutoCAD,the Solid History is turned on. Select a 3D object, then select the Property Manager, and in the Solid History Pulldown, you will notice that the History is set to Record, change this to NONE and set Show History from Yes to NO. If you run the BREP command, you can remove all of the history from 3D solid primatives and comosote solids in one go.

Finally, set the SOLIDHIST system variable to 0 in your current drawing and all of your Template drawings if you do not want to recored any the history of future created solids. This will dramatically cut down your drawing size.

Regards.