Have not noticed it appearing any more than before.

I think you are working in central model. Since the server is busy it will show a warning like this and it will not allow you to access the file.

I know how the process works and we're not in the Central file.
It's just that I've been getting a lot more calls from my users lately asking about that dialog.
Again, it seems like in 2016, you'd get the notice, but then it would go away as soon as the other person finished their SWC.
In 2017, if two people are synching at the same time, the second one never gets permission even after the first finishes.

I haven't seen it/heard about it, but most of our large projects are on C4R. I have noticed the sync dialog fail the sync to central, than try again, but that may be C4R specific.

Its not just when two (or more) people are syncing a file. I have had user have this pop up when it ti only THEM in the file. it will go away, but why does it keep coming up? if only one person has there local copy open, why would the file not be accessible?

Its becoming a real issue for us.

Can corroborate this partly. We're getting this issue on a 2017 project near constantly. Though it does happen during sync, the most worrying part is it's happening during edits (i.e. as a user is borrowing an element from the central without checking out an entire workset). This particular model isn't extremely large, 150MB only, with a second linked model of 40MB (for the building facade), 6 people working on it concurrently.

We've got a MUCH larger 2016 set of models also being worked on at present. 7 linked models ranging from 200MB up to 1.5GB each. This error has never happened in that model. Though the normal "This model is accessed by someone else" issue does occur if two are trying to sync at the same time.

What I can't exactly corroborate is that 2017 does seem to release the lock at some point. If you're patient enough and just leave that dialog open (not clicking the close button) it does go away and the edit you attempted continues and completes. Same goes for sync. Though the "patience" varies, we've seen times from a few seconds through to several minutes before this happens. Perhaps 2017 just doesn't release immediately, it may have some sort of delay on when the releasing happens.

Could it be when the server is creating a Shadow Copy of the volume that the Central file is contained on? We run Windows Server 2012R2, and for all files and folders contained on the server I can access Shadow Copy previous versions, and they're always shown as being created at 7 AM and Noon each day. I'm not sure how those times are specified, but maybe the Shadow Copy process is causing temporary access issues?

I'm thinking it's not actually 2917 that's the culprit, but more people on the team being on windows 10. There is an issue creeping up about incompatible versions of SMB on machines and servers, that's been making the rounds recently. Teams that are split between OS's or on an OS with a different SMB version than what their server supports may be feeling that.

Just a guess though. Haven't had any issues on our end. We're all r2017.2 on windows 10, with Windows server 2012.

Sent from my Phablet. Please excuse typos... and bad ideas.

Aaron Maller
Director
Parallax Team, Inc.

All Win10? yuck. Win7 Pro here in this office. Still the best OS Micro$oft has made IMHO.