Discover why it's crucial to understand and manage your file folder structure when working on a Building Information Modeling (BIM) project, and learn about the significance of automatically saved backup files. The article also provides tips on maintaining a neat and organized file folder for a smoother workflow.
Key Insights
- The BIM 201 folder contains both created and downloaded files, which includes casework, door tags, and workstations, amongst others.
- Files with a series of numbers at the end are automatically saved backup files, created each time a file is saved. These backups represent different versions of the model at various stages of development.
- Always work and share the file without numbers at the end, as it represents the most recent model. The numbered files could serve as backups in case of major issues but are usually not necessary.
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Before we get started on our next lesson, I wanted to go ahead and do a bit of a housekeeping task here just so that we can see exactly what we're looking at here in our file folder. So what I have is my BIM 201 folder that I've been working on, and it consists of the files that we've created and also some of the files that we've downloaded from the learning portal. When you see a lot of these other files in here, you can kind of tell that some of them are ones that we've created, like the casework and the door tag and the workstation, and obviously our file that we've been working on throughout the course.
But you're also seeing a few other things, mainly these files that have many numbers at the end here, and those are automatically saved backup files. So every time you hit save on your file, what it's going to do is it's going to create a backup. So you have these incremental saves that will go through and save that particular status of the model.
So this casework generic has versions that were saved over a period of time, and if you look at my project file here, which we know is a project file because that is the.rvt extension, whereas the casework generic is a family file because it has the.rfa extension. But if you see the project file has backups number six, seven, eight, and nine, and so that's every time I click the Quick Save button on my project, it's going to go ahead and throw in one of these backups. When you look at your folder, you might see a bunch more of these in here, and so the reason I'm showing you this is because in the past, I've had a lot of students working in these versions of the file here, and when you look at some of the date stamps, you can see that if this one was saved on the same day at 125, but if I were to back up here, I can see that number six here is actually a week earlier, and it was saved at a different time.
And so if you were to work in 06, then you'd be missing out on a whole week's worth of development, and you'd potentially be losing some work. So you always want to make sure that you're working in, and even if you have a question and you need to send me your model for whatever reason, you want to make sure you're sending the one that doesn't have all the numbers in the back. Now it's not a bad idea to keep these because they are older versions of your model, so in case something goes really bad, you can roll it back, but in most cases, that's not going to be necessary.
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So you could go through and clean up and delete those extra files to kind of just clean up your folder. So you can see as I get rid of those, instead of having many files in there, I'm now down to just this small handful, and I have a much cleaner file folder to work from.
