Xref pathing between offices

Hi, I work in Edinburgh and need to do 100+ drawings for our Manchester office. O.S. background and pipeline xrefs will be referenced into each drawing. I will be working from Edinburgh and ultimately all the drawings will be saved into the Manchester directory upon completion.

So, does anyone have an opinion on the best way to work; should I work (slowly) on the manchester server?

Or

Copy the xrefs onto the edinburgh server, work from here, finish the drawings and then copy them all back when Im done (if so, how do I re-path the xrefs to the manchester server without opening each one?).

Or

Anything else....?

Hope that's clear! Any comments back would be most appreciated, thanks.

Martin

I don't use XREFs but I had a similar problem with images located in Aberdeen while I work in Sussex.

I am assuming we can share the solution although we may need somebody else to tell you how to do it. Images can have full path, relative path or no path. When I first received the drawings they had full path references to the image so it took ages for the images to be seen at my end. I copied the images to a sub folder on our drive and changed all the paths to relative. I then moved all the images on the Scottish server into an identically named sub folder. That way the drawings could be moved between the servers and would pick up the local image file. If the image file was changed it had to be copied to both servers.

There IS an image management program available to AutoCAD but it didn't work how I wanted so I had to change all my references to Relative Path one image at a time. I believe there is an XREF manager but as I said above, somebody else will have to point you towards it.

Thanks Dave,

Yeah, your theory is close to what I'm after; I want to work on Edinburgh server with the xrefs pathed from here. A simple drag and drop onto the Manchester server when Im done and the xrefs automatically re-path to the Manchester versions of the files.

I think the answer lies with the path options, can anyone help me out....?

I have dealt with Xrefs across multiple locations before. They can be a bit of a headache, but Windows will make it easy for you.

We have our local file server in this office, as well as a remote file server in the branch office, and each holds its own separate project directories. We map the network drives to a drive letter, we'll call them L:\ for the Local drive and R:\ for the Remote branch office drive. Assuming you are consistent with your drive letters, this would allow anyone in your organization to open the file from L:\ drive and not have to go searching for the Xref on the R:\ since the drawing would automatically know where to find the referenced drawing.

It's very easy to attach an Xref from a remote location this way, simply use the path to the file on R:\survey\1234\ for the source of your Xref while you're working on the drawing in L:\project\1234\ or something. Of course you can't use relative paths here, you'll have to do the full path. This means that if you want to send your drawings to a client, they won't be able to find the Xref in its location since it's not a relative path. Also, it is going to be a little slower because it's reading from the remote file server instead of locally on the computer or on the local file server. For anyone inside your organization who can access the remote file servers it will be seamless.

Another option would be to synchronize those directories. Windows has built in sync features that allow you to view "offline files" and then will update the remote files once you sync it. It may be just as easy to copy the file to your local project directory (C:\projects\1234\) then manually copy everything back to the remote project directory (R:\projects\1234\) to overwrite the old files once you're done with your revisions. Synchronization can cause problems if two people are both trying to modify the same file, as one will overwrite the other, but it works well enough if you'll be able to communicate with other members of the project team. ("Hey I'm getting ready to update the survey so it will be off limits until 3:30") This will allow you to use relative paths for your references, so as long as you keep all the files in the same directory, it shouldn't have any problems finding things. You can just Zip the whole project folder and transmit it to a client, or you can drag and drop the directory from one computer/server to another.

Hope that at least offers some insight. Good luck!

Thanks for the reply, thats great.

Cheers