Automated BIM360 Docs On Premises Backup Using CollaborationCache and Dynamo

Automated BIM360 Docs On Premises Backup Using CollaborationCache and Dynamo

I have developed a working BIM360 to on-premises backup mechanism. There were a few different ways to go…

 

I initially considered:

  • Hacking Windows Explorer to touch the files in the BIM 360 node and try and trigger the BIM360 Docs download and copy to local PC or network location
  • Developing a Forge app that essentially pulls the desired models out of the BIM 360 cloud to desired location?

In the end, I decided to use the Revit API (Dynamo and Python), along with VirtualBuiltApp, to essentially reverse engineer a folder structure from the local CollaborationCache folder. These ideas are hinted at here.

 

In simple terms, the BIM 360 Docs on-premises backup workflow is:

  1. Create a super federated BIM 360 model (with all other BIM 360 models linked into it)
  2. A Dynamo script reloads all links in order to cache them locally
  3. The same script interrogates, then determines the target file name and folder from VirtualBuiltApp
  4. Dynamo then copies the files into their ‘backup’…

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