Category: Autodesk Docs

Solution for “Revit 2021 Fails to Link Revit Model and Provides No Error Message”

Luke Johnson

Problem:

I was recently trying to link Revit models to a federated file on Revit 2021. The models were failing to link, but no error message or warning was provided. The federated host model and the links were all initiated and ‘live’ collaborated models on the Autodesk Construction Cloud.

 

Resolution:

I had previously used this method ( Moving the Revit BIM360 CollaborationCache Folder to a Secondary Hard Drive ) to move the cache for BIM 360 / ACC Docs to a secondary hard drive. Windows Explorer showed this hard drive was essentially running out of space. So Revit was failing to link the model, but wasn’t providing a ‘insufficient hard drive space’ warning.

But why was the hard drive filling up?

I reviewed the files and folders and discovered that one particular program was generating massive log files:

The final resolution was quite simple – delete the massive log files, and then the files linked to Revit fine. I used 7-zip with the “Fastest” and “Delete files after compression” option to archive and delete those logs.

To future-proof this scenario, I’m considering writing a Powershell script to detect and possibly archive and delete the existence of massive log files.

Fix Revit Links “Not Found” after the Migration from BIM 360 Docs to Autodesk Docs

Luke Johnson

When a recent update to Autodesk Desktop Connector forced a migration to Autodesk Docs, file paths were generally change like this:

FROM – C:\Users\USERNAME\BIM 360\YOURFOLDERS

TO – C:\Users\USERNAME\ACCDocs\YOURFOLDERS

 

If you were doing some interesting tricks with BIM 360 Docs, and sharing and federating Revit models as non-initiated files on BIM 360, you may find that links were broken and “Not Found” in Manage Links after that latest Desktop Connector installation.

 

But don’t worry! You can just set a symbolic link to point from the old BIM 360 Docs location, to the new location. The Command Prompt script looks like this:

if exist "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\BIM 360" rename "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\BIM 360" BIM360.old
mklink /d "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\BIM 360" C:\Users\%USERNAME%\ACCDocs
Run these commands to fix links Not Found

The moment after this script was run, I was able to hit Reload from Manage Links in Revit and the new location was detected and links were loaded successfully. Note that they still appear in Revit as if they are in the old location, but really it is reading the latest data from Autodesk Docs, and that new location is being updated by Autodesk Desktop Connector.

Related Note:

I had already setup a symbolic link to move my BIM 360 Revit Cache folder to a secondary hard drive.

At this stage it appears those links are still working, as the Revit CollaborationCache is a different technology to the simple file sharing mechanism of Autodesk Docs.