Virtual Surveyor projects are organized around a project folder which consists of a .vspx project file and optionally associated terrain files. You can use the Project Files button to instantly open the file location of your current project file with a single click. The Copy Terrains button moves all your terrain data to the same folder location as your project file. 

In this article, we'll show you how these functions work and how you can pair them together to help organize, share, and move project files faster and more easily. The Project Files and Copy Terrains buttons can be found in the Project Folder section of the Export tab.

Overview

• Open Project Files
  • Advantages of the Project Files Function
  • Types of Project Files
• Copy Terrains
  • Save As

Open Project Files

Simply put, the Project Files button gives you direct access to your Virtual Surveyor project file location. You can use the Project Files button or Ctrl+E to open directly to the folder that holds your project files. There are a number of advantages this function gives you to quickly locate, access, and share project files.   

Advantages of the Project Files Function

Easy access to your Project Files. No need to search and navigate for your Project Files through File Explorer. You get instant access to your project files so you can:

• Create a new Virtual Surveyor project and quickly get to work using the terrain files you already have.
• Locate your terrain files ( dsm.Ei.tif and ortho.Ii.tif ) and load them to another application of your choice.

Direct access to your Project Folder. Get direct access to your Project Folder when you need to:

• Share your project externally with companies/people outside of your organization with your OneDrive/Dropbox cloud service.
• Upload your project to our support team for help with a specific problem that is unique to your dataset.

Share your projects externally. To share your project externally or with our support team, ensure your terrain files are in the same folder as your .vspx project file. Otherwise, the terrain won't display in the Virtual Surveyor app when using the project file on another machine. 

• Use the Copy Terrains function to easily copy all terrain files in your Virtual Surveyor project into the project folder.

Types of Project Files

Copy Terrains

You can use the Copy Terrains (and Save As) function to include and consolidate your terrain files to a single project folder. Your terrain files may be stored in a separate location than your .vspx project file, so you can use either the Copy Terrains function or Save As to move your terrain data to the same location as your project file.

Copy Terrains. The Copy Terrains button will immediately create copies of any terrain data found in your project file—including the ones stored in separate Timesteps—to the same location as your Virtual Surveyor project folder where the .vspx file is stored.

1. Click the Project Files button to confirm that the terrain data isn't in the same folder location.
   
2. Click Copy Terrains to create terrain data copies in the same location as the project file.
   

Save As

The Copy Terrains functionality is built-in to the Save As feature. After clicking File>Save As, the app will prompt you: “Do you want to copy all the terrain files used in this project to the saved location?”:

Click Yes to copy your terrain files to the same folder as your project file.

• This does not remove the original terrain files; it only duplicates them to the current project folder. 

Click No to avoid duplicating data sets when they’re already stored in another folder location. As long as you have access to the original file, you don't need to create a copy. 

• You can also skip copying the terrain data if your project is huge—say 10 GB of terrain data—to save space on your computer.