Understanding and using the audit and compact tools

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After completing this lesson, you'll be able to understand the audit tool and compact the central file.

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The objective domains covered are, 5.6b, understand and use the audit and compact tools.

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The audit tool is used to maintain Revit model health or to open and fix a model that ordinarily does not open.

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It is recommended to perform an audit periodically and for the reasons stated below: When upgrading a Revit model, when elements have become corrupt,

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or if the model is over 1 gigabyte or greater than 1/20th of your available RAM.

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Central models can become very large, especially if the model division or level of detail is not managed correctly.

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It is useful to periodically select compact file when performing a synchronization on a central file, as this will reduce the file size.

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To perform an audit on a Revit file, the file cannot currently be opened.

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So you need to close down the file and then select "Open".

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In the Open dialog box, you can then select the "Audit" option.

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You'll then be warned that the audit could take a long time.

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So it's recommended to do this at the end of the working day.

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The dialog box also informs us that we should be auditing on a regular basis.

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It's recommended doing this weekly, especially when you have large models or corrupt files.

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So let's go ahead and select "Yes".

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And we can then pick the model we'd like to audit.

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Now when you audit a model, you won't get a report on the health of the model,

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it will simply just open it and then attempt to repair any corrupt files or problems.

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Also, you may find that it reduces the file size. Let's go ahead and select "Open" here.

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So the model is now opened up and been audited.

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As I've said, you won't receive a report on any issues here.

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Now if the audit files and you still can't recover a Revit model, then the next step is to go ahead and look at the journal file.

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So the journal file may indicate families that have been corrupt, and you can then get the element ID and search for that element ID,

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and then delete the families that are causing corruption.

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You can then try and run the audit process again.

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Here, I now have a central file open.

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And what I'd like to do here is compact the central file.

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It's useful to do this periodically which will reduce the central file size.

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To do this, select the "Collaborate" ribbon and click "Synchronize with Central".

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You can then go ahead and select Compact Central Model.

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But, as indicated here, you can see that the synchronization and save will be much slower,

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but it will compact and reduce the file size of the central model.

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You can then go ahead and select "OK".

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If you want it to be able to compare file sizes and find out when the compaction happens,

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we could just simply type in for the comment, Compact Central Model, and then click "OK".

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Ok, so the central file is now saved and being compacted.