More on Customization Sync

After I posted last week about Customization Sync in AutoCAD 2013, I got a follow-up question from R.K. McSwain of CAD Panacea. He asked how to prevent changes from syncing—for instance, in the hypothetical Chicago/Des Moines example, how to prevent your Des Moines-specific settings from affecting your Chicago profile

Here’s how I would do it:

If you want to make a temporary change to your settings (like adding the printers for Des Moines), you can sync your settings when you get there, then stop syncing them by clicking “Sync my Settings” on the ribbon. That brings up this dialog:

After you confirm that you want to stop syncing, you can make your changes and work happily in Des Moines for the next week.

When you get back to Chicago, you will probably to sync your settings again—either to push your changes to the cloud or restore the original saved settings. When you click “Sync My Settings” again, you first go through this dialog:

And once you say “start”, you get this dialog:

At which point you can choose to which settings (in this case, Des Moines or Chicago) you want to keep.

Note that you have to stay signed in to Autodesk 360 for this to work best. If you make changes while you’re signed out, or without an internet connection, only what’s in the cloud will be saved for the next time you’re online. And of course, you can always keep different configurations in workspaces and profiles if you find yourself switching back and forth frequently.