Migrating Xrefs to new server - how to avoid broken links?

How to avoid broken links to an Xref while migrating to a new server?

We will migrate our servers and have to move all Xrefs. The Xrefs are composed from files located on different harddrives. Let's say A: / B: / C:

When migrating to our new servers I suppose we are just fine when we name the new harddrives exactly the same as the current situation? Are there any other things we should take care of?

Thanks!

If you have access to a version 2004 or higher I would recommend looking into the Reference Manager (a stand alone program found in the Start-menu under Autodesk) but for 2002 that is not availible it seems.

For projects that are active and need to be up and running first thing I would perhaps consider compiling them with E-transmit to get a package of your drawing and the x-refs.

This is one of the reasons we never really started using XREFs - our servers seemed to get renamed every week. But from previous experience providing your path names are identical, you won't have problems. Having said that, a fall back plan as suggested by Tiger sounds very sensible to me.

Try doing an eTransmit to the new folders. Use ET's Transmital Setup, create a new setup / modify the standard one, then instead of the package type being a ZIP / EXE choose the "Folder (set of files)". Change the "Path Options" at the bottom to "Use organized folder structure" ans set the "Source root folder" to the root of where your projects are (or otherwise if you want to change something different). Lastly change the "Transmittal file folder" in the middle to where you want your files to appear now.

Then simply run an eTransmit on each of the DWG's which load your xrefs. This can even be done using scripts so you can perform the same on multiple DWGs in one instruction. The eTransmit will repath all the xrefs to be relative to their new positions.

The problem with the Reference Manager (I've found) is it always uses that particular ACad's file version when modifying the files. So after you've adjusted them, they'll all be 2004/7/10 versions, and won't be open-able in 2002. Of course you could then run a script to saveas to 2000 again ... but in such case you've just made more work for yourself than simply running the eTransmit script.

Otherwise I've also seen some lisps which change the xref paths to be relative - so you can then simply copy them to a new location. As long as their relative positions in the folder stucture stays the same, the xrefs should then be found. It's just when you rename a folder / move it somewhere else that these could become broken. Some suggest always using relative paths in xrefs, but I've found some problems with these if you saveas / copy-n-paste between different folder strctures - they seem to work fine until you reopen the DWG - when the unfound error pops up. So, my suggestion is keep them on full paths and use eTransmit when you want to move them to somewhere else.

Thanks for the replies so far.

I will try some suggestions. Luckily the deadline is still a couple of months away. I really want to be sure.

you can realative path your xreference such as ../../filename.dwg or ../file name.dwg. you'll have to retain any subsequent directory structure associated with the xreferenced files but once you have this set up they can move things and rename servers all they want with out messing up your xreferenced files.