Hello,
Our office has been using Datacad within Windows 7 virtual machines hosted on Imacs using VMWare Fusion for about 5 years. Until recently we had a mac mini server on which all of our project files would reside and could be accessed from both the windows side and the mac side. This has served us well, but now due to changing office dynamics we are attempting to use cloud computing for our file serving needs. We have chosen to use Dropbox for Business to fill this roll and so far it has worked well. The difficulty has been that having to sync both the windows side and the mac side takes up large amounts of bandwidth and hard drive space. To mitigate this we have been using Dropbox's selective sync feature on the windows side to keep file syncing to a minimum. Unfortunately this takes too much management and becomes an annoyance when you have to sync a folder just to pull a detail from an old project.
To simplify all of this we wanted to have Dropbox reside only on the host mac and share the entire thing through Fusion's folder sharing feature. We have also mapped the Dropbox folder location to a drive letter so that all xrefs would not become orphaned when opened from another computer. This looked like it would work, after we did some test saves from the windows side in various programs like word, sketchup and images from the internet. Unfortunately when we opened a project file in Datacad it would open fine but when saved we would get an alert "Unable to save drawing due to insufficient disc space." After much testing it appears to be a file depth issue despite the fact that we are nowhere near the maximum character limit for a file name. A typical file string is B:\Project\4 WA Drawings\4-1 Dcad\File.aec. Even if the project name is 20 characters (typically more like 15) and the file name is 10 characters (typically closer to 6) we are still only at 52 characters. Our understanding was that the limit was 80, but maybe we have that wrong. Also this is the same file string that we use if accessing Dropbox directly from the windows side, so it seems like there should be no problem. What makes us think file depth is the issue though, is that if we save the same file at B:\Project\File.aec, it works just fine. Any deeper and we get the alert.
I know we are using a very unconventional file system, but since the problem only happens with Datacad, I thought we would start here. Any help would be very appreciated.
Thanks,
Nathan
Our office has been using Datacad within Windows 7 virtual machines hosted on Imacs using VMWare Fusion for about 5 years. Until recently we had a mac mini server on which all of our project files would reside and could be accessed from both the windows side and the mac side. This has served us well, but now due to changing office dynamics we are attempting to use cloud computing for our file serving needs. We have chosen to use Dropbox for Business to fill this roll and so far it has worked well. The difficulty has been that having to sync both the windows side and the mac side takes up large amounts of bandwidth and hard drive space. To mitigate this we have been using Dropbox's selective sync feature on the windows side to keep file syncing to a minimum. Unfortunately this takes too much management and becomes an annoyance when you have to sync a folder just to pull a detail from an old project.
To simplify all of this we wanted to have Dropbox reside only on the host mac and share the entire thing through Fusion's folder sharing feature. We have also mapped the Dropbox folder location to a drive letter so that all xrefs would not become orphaned when opened from another computer. This looked like it would work, after we did some test saves from the windows side in various programs like word, sketchup and images from the internet. Unfortunately when we opened a project file in Datacad it would open fine but when saved we would get an alert "Unable to save drawing due to insufficient disc space." After much testing it appears to be a file depth issue despite the fact that we are nowhere near the maximum character limit for a file name. A typical file string is B:\Project\4 WA Drawings\4-1 Dcad\File.aec. Even if the project name is 20 characters (typically more like 15) and the file name is 10 characters (typically closer to 6) we are still only at 52 characters. Our understanding was that the limit was 80, but maybe we have that wrong. Also this is the same file string that we use if accessing Dropbox directly from the windows side, so it seems like there should be no problem. What makes us think file depth is the issue though, is that if we save the same file at B:\Project\File.aec, it works just fine. Any deeper and we get the alert.
I know we are using a very unconventional file system, but since the problem only happens with Datacad, I thought we would start here. Any help would be very appreciated.
Thanks,
Nathan