• Archicad 10
• Project Migration
• File and project sizes

About file and project sizes

After you open an ArchiCAD 9 Project File or a PlotMaker 9 Layout Book in ArchiCAD 10, you may notice that file sizes have decreased dramatically. You may notice decreases in size to 1/3 – 1/5 or even less of previous sizes.

You may think this is because data loss has occurred in the file. However, this is not the case. There are two reasons why there is such a decrease in file size.

The first is because the data structures have become more compact in ArchiCAD 10, so the same file will be smaller.
The second is because file compression is available within ArchiCAD 10. Using this feature, the size of files can be reduced by 60-80 % or even more.

The following table shows some of the file size decreases you can expect with two randomly chosen Project Files:

The following table shows similar data for Layout Books:

The last table shows how Files sizes can be expected to change when a Project File and a Layout Book belonging to that Project is migrated and merged into a single ArchiCAD 10 Project File:

Please also note that the way Drawings are updated and the amount of memory the program requires has been dramatically improved in ArchiCAD 10 compared to the way it performed in PlotMaker 9. For this reason you can expect that ArchiCAD 10 will be able to handle the same Project Files/Layout Book with greater ease than ArchiCAD 9/PlotMaker 9. For example, PlotMaker 9 required much more memory to perform updates of placed Drawings than does ArchiCAD 10. Above a certain file size or above a certain number of placed Drawings, PlotMaker 9 could have a hard time getting the job done. Since ArchiCAD 10 performs much better and more sparingly, it will be able to handle larger Projects with greater ease, even in the case where Project File data and Layout Book data are merged into one Project File.

CategoryPerformance, CategorySetup