Opening an Autocad drawing that is already open

We run AutoCad LT 2008 in our office on Paralells for Mac and have come across a major problem. When I have a drawing open and another person from my office wants to open the same drawing, AutoCad usually gives a warning that the drawing is already open and if you still want to open it you can do so as a read-only file. For us, this is not happening, so my co-worker just opens the file and then makes changes and saves over my work (because I already had the file open). Any idea what is happening here? Is there some sort of a box to click that I can get this to work? Or is this a problem with running on the Mac environment???

That is an operating system/network problem. The O/S is what tells AutoCAD whether or not the file is in use.

So what you are saying is that two people can open the same drawing at the same time and the last one out wins?

That is what I figured, that it was a system/network problem. Any idea how to fix that? I am clueless when it comes to that kind of stuff. But yeah, the last one out wins and saves over the top of work done by other people who don't know that someone else has the file open.

We were having this problem as well. Our issue was that we were mirroring our server between two offices, but the dwl file (which tells AutoCAD that a file is open) was being created by AutoCAD as a hidden file and it wasn't being copied over with the dwg file. I wouldn't be suprized if that's your problem as well.

If you are wondering, I don't think we've come up with a good solution yet.

So what you are saying is that two people can open the same drawing at the same time and the last one out wins?

Oh my, system needs IT help, quick. I think the_real_ptb is hitting the nail on-the-head. the *.dwl (temporary) file is only being generated locally.

I can only imagine the problems that would arise! Ouch!

Can you reset your mirroring software to mirror hidden files as well? or perhaps Autodesk can be contacted and asked if there's a switch somewhere that will stop them from being hidden?

There IS a setting on 2004 and greater that will stop the DWL (and DWL2) from being generated at all, but it has to be set by removing a registry entry. THis wouldn't fix the problem, it would just mean folks could wander into your drawing file locally too.

Part of the next problem will be that although the DWL file is copied successfully, it is not automatically deleted off the mirror.. which would mean that if person A opens the file, and creates the DWL files, the DWL will be deleted locally only. Person B will not be able to access that drawing file until the remote DWL is erased. From what I understand, it's not easy to delete that file either, but I'm not sure of that.

I would recommend "moving" the file to a local, unmirrored, location before you work on it, and then move it back afterwards.

If you want to get fancy.. leave a "calling card" in the form of a text file that stays in the directory saying that you have the file, and provide your phone number.. in case there's an important adjustment which needs to be made, and also to prevent someone else from creating a new drawing file with the same name.

A nice quick batchfile should be able to handle that with the click of a button.