File hygiene, performance, and recovery

Revit files get slow and fragile for a small number of well-understood reasons. This page is the maintenance manual.

Where things live

Two of those are worth knowing cold:

Journals record every action Revit took, including the crash. They're plain text. When Autodesk support asks for a journal, this is what they mean, and reading the tail of one yourself will often name the add-in or element that killed the session.

KeyboardShortcuts.xml is portable. Copy it between machines and your shortcuts come with you.

The number of backups

File → Save As → Options → Maximum backups. Default is 20 for non-workshared files, which means twenty copies of your project sitting next to it. On a 300 MB model that's 6 GB. Set it to 3–5 for practice work; keep it higher on real projects where recovery matters more than disk.

What actually makes models slow

In rough order of impact:

1. Imported CAD — especially imported (not linked) DWGs, and worse, CAD imported into a family. Brings in line styles and layers that can't be purged. Check Manage → Manage Links → CAD Formats and Insert → Import history.
2. Too many warnings. Thousands of unresolved warnings genuinely costs performance and memory.
3. Model far from the internal origin. See coordinates.
4. In-place families and excessive groups. Each in-place family is its own family definition. Groups with hosted elements are especially expensive.
5. Unnecessary detail in families — high-poly furniture, imported manufacturer geometry, no detail-level visibility control.
6. Too many open worksets in a workshared model. Closing worksets you don't need is the single fastest speed-up available.
7. Excessive views. Every view is cheap alone; 4,000 views is not. Purge views nobody uses.
8. Huge point clouds and reality-capture meshes, unless you're on a release with the newer optimized handling.
9. Complex void cuts and nested shared families in heavily-placed content.
10. Design options left in place long after the decision was made.

Audit, Purge, Compact — three different things

Audit

File → Open, tick Audit. Checks and repairs the file's internal data structures.

• Slow — expect minutes on a large model — and it rewrites the file.
• Run it weekly on a busy central model, not on every open.
• On a workshared central, audit and then re-save as central.

Purge Unused

Manage → Purge Unused. Removes unplaced families, unused types, unused materials, unused groups, and unused appearance assets.

• It's aggressive. It removes types you intended to use but haven't placed yet.
• Run it, then verify your intended content survived.
• Run it three times — purging one thing sometimes orphans another.
• It cannot remove imported line styles from a CAD import that's still present.

Compact

File → Save As → Options → Compact File, or the checkbox on Synchronize with Central. Rewrites the file, discarding the incremental-save slack.

• Revit normally appends changes rather than rewriting, so files grow.
• Compacting takes longer to save but meaningfully shrinks the file.
• On a workshared model, compact on the last sync of the day, not every sync.

Purging imported line styles

The classic unpurgeable mess. If you have hundreds of line styles named things like A-WALL-FULL or IMPORT-...:

1. Delete every CAD import and link (Manage → Manage Links → CAD Formats, and check every view for imports).
2. Delete any family that had CAD imported into it, or edit the family, delete the import, and reload.
3. Manage → Purge Unused — repeatedly.
4. Manage → Additional Settings → Line Styles and delete what remains.

If they still won't go, a CAD import is still present somewhere — commonly in a drafting view, a legend, or inside a loaded family. Manage → Purge Unused's tree will list families you didn't know you had.

Recovery, in order of preference

1. Open with Audit. Fixes many "this file won't open" cases outright.
2. Open the most recent backup. Non-workshared: the .000N.rvt sibling. Workshared: use Collaborate → Restore Backup and point it at the _backup folder — do not copy files out of that folder by hand.
3. Detach from Central. File → Open, tick Detach from Central. Gives you a standalone copy of the model. This is the standard rescue when a central is damaged: detach, then save as a new central and have everyone make fresh locals.
4. Delete the offending view. If one view won't open, right-click → Delete in the Project Browser without opening it.
5. Copy into a fresh file. New project from your template, then Copy → Paste → Aligned to Same Place, in batches by category. Levels and grids first, then model elements, then re-create views. Slow and reliable.

Model health checklist

Run this monthly, or before any issue:

• Manage → Warnings count, and it's trending down not up
• Manage → Purge Unused, run to completion
• Audit on open
• Compact on save
• No imported (as opposed to linked) CAD anywhere
• No CAD inside any family
• Model within a couple of miles of the internal origin
• Views not on sheets: reviewed, and unused ones deleted
• In-place families: counted, and each one justified
• Groups: no groups containing hosted elements
• Design options: resolved options accepted and deleted
• File size: noted, so you can see it jump when something goes wrong

That last one matters more than it sounds. A file that grew 200 MB in a week had something imported into it, and knowing the week is how you find out what.