The Signature Validation Options window will open up. That led me to this AKN article about turning off the digital signatures for AutoCAD files. I sort of remember how to fix it, so some quick Googling got me to this forum post which confirmed the old issue – Windows accesses DWGs to check for digital signatures by default, essentially touching every single DWG it found. Which should sound very familiar… The Old Fix – Which Hopefully Is the New Fix Windows was doing something where it needed to touch every single DWG it saw. Windows took WAY too long to list the contents and each file would kind of POP into the list. The issue was when you opened a network folder that had a bunch of DWGs. I had to troubleshoot it and figure out a way to force the fix on all the PCs. This was… years ago… when file servers were clunkier, and network speeds were slow. What could Windows be doing to want to touch every single DWG it sees? This led me to… The Old Problem – Network Folders Taking a Long Time to List DWGs Something was accessing those files and telling Dropbox to download them. Offline DWGs becoming local DWGs when I don’t want them to You can tell because the usual “empty” icons for the offline files were popping into “real” icons.

The strange thing that I noticed is when I opened an Online folder with DWGs in it, those DWGs would download without me accessing them. So there are blank tiny files that show me all the files in a folder, but it helps to not clog up my hard drive. I like to use the Smart Sync feature, where my Dropbox folders don’t download a file’s actual contents until I need them.

For us, we like to leverage BIM 360 as often as we can, but for archiving, or sharing files with clients who don’t have BIM 360, we use Dropbox. The New Problem – DWGs Showing Up in Dropbox Offline FoldersĬloud hosted storage solves a lot of problems. It’s funny how sometimes when you are working on what seems like a new problem, your brain realizes it feels a lot like an old problem just with a new coat of paint.

Dropbox smart sync not showing