Isolating and Cleaning Sources of Rampant Drawing Corruption in Your Office
Issue
You seem to be experincing a pattern of drawing corruption with DWGs throughout your office. You'd like to find a way to locate and eradicate the corruption from your files.
What's drawing corruption? Find out here.
Drawing corruption is a major source of headaches and lost work for CAD designers. Although it can occur for a number of reasons, cleaning your drawings, including all Xrefs, frequently is the best way to prevent it. See our Drawing File Cleanup: Addressing DWG Corruption webinar for a run-through of the process of cleaning your drawings and to pick up some effective techniques for detecting and troubleshooting corruption when it strikes.
Solution
Step 1: Test for corruption.
1A. The critical first step is to identify an issue that is happening with the drawing set – in almost all cases, originating from one of the Xrefs – that signals it could be drawing corruption. This issue needs to be easily replicated. If it's a drawing crash, what action tends to cause the crash? If it’s an error, what action always causes that error? If it’s slowness, identify actions that are particularly slow, and compare them with the speed of the same actions in a completely blank drawing created from the acad.dwt template (assuming nobody's overwritten that base template – you can always get a fresh one from a new install of AutoCAD).
1B. Confirm that the same actions do not cause the issue in a completely blank drawing created from the acad.dwt template. Follow our steps to attempt to duplicate an issue in a blank drawing.
Make sure the drawing is completely blank, without any attached Xrefs or inserted blocks.
Is the issue or error still occurring in the blank drawing?
- Yes, the issue is still occurring in the blank drawing: The issue is not the result of drawing corruption. Use the search bar at the top of this page to search our Knowledge Base for the issue or error you're experiencing.
- No, the issue is not still occurring in the blank drawing: Move on to the following steps to troubleshoot and remove drawing corruption.
Step 2: Troubleshoot and remove drawing corruption.
Important note:
Before you start cleaning your drawings and all Xrefs, keep in mind that some corruption can jump through an instance of AutoCAD. In other words, you can open and close a corrupt drawing, but keep AutoCAD open. Then, when you open a clean drawing, Proxy Objects and other corruption-causing entities can jump into it and will save with it, showing up the next time you open the previously clean drawing. This issue can occur even if you clean a drawing but then re-save it immediately afterward. That's why our cleaning steps always save drawing sets in a way that doesn’t carry Proxy Objects. After cleaning, close all drawings without saving them and then also restart AutoCAD or F/X CAD. This practice will clear the instance memory, and the corruption won’t spread.
2A. Type OP in the Command line and press Enter to open the Options dialog box.
Select the Open and Save tab.
Set the options in the ObjectARX Applications area to the following settings:
- Demand load ObjectARX apps: Set to Command invoke.
- Proxy images for custom objects: Set to Command invoke.
- Show Proxy Information dialog box: Select this option (i.e., check the box.).
2B. Now start isolating the potential sources of corruption.
First, start a new drawing using your office drawing template. Save it as a new drawing as is. Close CAD and open that saved drawing. Is it corrupted already? If so, run either NUKE or our Manual Cleaning steps on the template and re-save it. Then test the template again the same way. Keep trying until it’s totally clean.
Our manual drawing cleanup steps are much more than Purge, Audit, and delete Registered Applications (RegApps). The Clean Export step removes Proxy Objects, which those other tools don’t.
Also, some Proxy Objects are OK to keep. ISMs are for images, and Wipeouts are for Wipeouts. If you’re actively using AutoCAD Civil in your office, those are OK to keep as well. In our experiencem these types of Proxy Objects don't cause corruption.
However, AutoCAD 2007 Architectural desktop Proxy Objects are always bad and should be removed. More about Proxy Objects
If you’re having a really hard time cleaning, it might end up being faster to just re-draw the template from scratch starting from the acad.dwt.
2C. Continue adding more and more office blocks, then saving, closing, and opening to see whether those blocks added Proxy Objects. If they do, clean the source files. You could also just open the blocks themselves from their DWG files and see whether those files have corruption. To clean files, you can either use:
- Our Nuke tool (the fastest option), or
- Our manual drawing cleanup steps (if you don't want to nuke, or if Nuke fails
Other important considerations:
- You can also go through and open your saved Land F/X details, checking and cleaning all those files as necessary.
- Make sure you’ve actually been cleaning your corrupt drawings correctly. In many cases, they might have been cleaned in the wrong order, or not at all. Follow our steps for cleaning drawings & Xrefs.
- Still having issues with a drawing and can’t get rid of the corruption? If so, send it to us in a technical support ticket. Usually, the problem will have resulted from a missed step, and we can help identify which step you may have missed.
Going through these steps should clear out your office drawing libraries of potentially corrupting blocks.
Contact
- Land F/X
Our software tailors AutoCAD® to the needs of landscape architects, irrigation designers, and other professionals. We automate your most tedious tasks and ensure accuracy, giving you more time to design.