It was bound to happen sooner or later with a new cloud-connected design software – The Great Fusion 360 Service Outage of 2016. In early December, there was an unplanned outage that lasted nearly an entire day. I watched the updates from Autodesk rolling in, predictions of restoration one after another passing by with no fulfillment. In fact, this very scenario is one that makes many traditional CAD users wary of a connected product like Fusion 360.
Now you may think I’m crazy, but instead of anxious, I was excited! When there is a major service outage on a cloud-connected application that relies on being connected and impacts all users’ work, you know there will be a big push for improvements in the near future! Within a month, news of updatesstarted trickling out from Autodesk that pointed to big improvements in the way they handle offline mode in Fusion 360. Shortly after that, we got a big Fusion Forecast article that detailed more of the new tech and the roadmap for it. Months, not years!! Now that’s an update cycle I can stand behind!
The first phase, which rolled out in the Fusion 360 update last night, will display offline data with the full project and folder structure you get in online mode. Locally cached files you can work on in this mode will look normal, whereas non-cached files will be greyed out. This will be a huge improvement over the haphazard tangle of all project files you previously saw in offline mode.
Currently Fusion 360 automatically caches any files you’ve worked on within a specified number of days, and those are the only files available in offline mode. In phase 2 which will be rolled out later this year, you’ll be able to selectively cache files for offline mode. And for phase 3 Autodesk will add automatic sync! You will be able to set projects, folders, or designs to always automatically sync to the offline cache. With the full implementation, any surprise outage will only be a minor inconvenience. You’ll be able to continue working on your files and simply re-sync them when you’ve reconnected. These are all great enhancements which will minimize the impact of unplanned and planned outages!
