xref importing

Hello,

My name is Al. I am a Sheetmetal Worker in construction and am a Cad draftsman.I work in autocad mep 2012. I am working on Tower-2 at the World Trade Ctr. in New York City. We constantlly get an obscene number of revised Arch drawings, at present we have to import these 3 to 4 gig dwgs with all the x-ref dwgs accociated with the newly circulated revisions from the Architect this takes a rediculous ammount of time. Our process is to go to the FTP Site on line for this project,hunt any new dates and import these files to our job file in my computer.I then have to import the xrefs as well to make a complete drawing to review the changes. If possible is there a faster way to retreive this info. I presently find the file,open it up and usually there is a model folder,I open that up and find 2 to 3 folders defing for example clg's. I right click the mouse on that folder and select cut,then I back arrow 2x to the original folder and paste it in that folder,this process takes up to 2 hrs,depending on the ammt. of changes.Then when im sure I have all the files for that particular change I go over each one and rt, click and select bind,and continue until I am sure that all files are bound for a complete dwg. Sorry to have written a long question,any help would be greatly appreciated,thank you.

What I do is utilize an archive folder. The files usually don't change names, so if you archive the current set of architectural XREF's and replace them with the new XREF files from the architect, when you open AutoCAD it is referencing the new files.

So what my company does is this:

• Have the XREF files in a particular folder. For us, we have a designated folder in the job folder, called "Reference Files".
  
• Inside the "Reference Files" folder, there's another folder named "Archive".
  
• When there's a new update for all the XREF files, we'll create a folder inside the Archive folder, naming it the date. So for instance, for today's date the folder will read "2012-02-05" and all the files get moved in there.
  
• We then download/copy the new XREF's in the "Reference Files" directory.
  
• Since you have AutoCAD MEP, you can use the Drawing Compare tool. Click the Application Icon > Drawing Utilities > Drawing Compare. There is information on how to use this in the Help file here. http://exchange.autodesk.com/autocadmep/enu/online-help/search#WS1a9193826455f5ff13ee121107bdda7722-6fc2.htm
  This is a very useful tool when you have undocumented changes come in from other design parties.
  

Hope this helps some.