Dropbox – the Poor Man’s WAFS

For all of you who are interested in Revit Worksharing over WAN but cannot afford a WAFS solution to make save-to-central times acceptable, there might be a solution.

Before that - DISCLAIMER: The content presented here is solely intended to be on experimental basis. DO NOT use this in a production environment. Using this tip is solely at YOUR OWN RISK

Required: an account with dropbox - www.dropbox.com

Setup:

Install Dropbox

Create a new shared folder - e.g. Worksharing

Substitute the path to the central file by using the DOS Subst command pointing to the shared Dropbox folder where you want to place your central file.

E.g. - if your path to the shared folder is X:\Worksharing then open an command window in Windows (run "Cmd") and type:

SUBST W: X:\Worksharing

Now drive W:\ will point directly to the folder. This step is technically required since otherwise Revit will recognize the UNC path during save-to-central and store that in the central file. This will make worksharing fail since the UNC path is likely to be different with every team member. However, Revit cannot see the UNC path through a SUBSTed drive and therefore will only store the DOS path, in our example W:\MyCentralFile

IMPORTANT: Every member of the team needs to do the above step. To make WAN worksharing work, every member of the team MUST see the file at e.g. W:\MyCentralFile

From that point on you are ready to go - save-to-central to your shared Dropbox location, open as a local copy and you should experience speed close to LAN speeds.

LIMITATIONS:

The first synchronization via Dropbox will require patience, depending on filesize and network/internet speed. The reason is that at the first time, the entire amount of data needs to pass through. Subsequent save-to-centrals only transmit the delta in filesize.

Timing issues persist - due to delayed transmission of access rights in the file you can get into a situation where two ore more team members borrow the same element. THIS CAN CORRUPT YOUR FILE. Be prudent with element borrowing.

Coordinate Save-to-centrals (using a chat applet like, skype...) to avoid simultaneous synching.

As said - the above is solely intended to be a technical experiment...