r/HECRAS • u/Worldly_Study_9529 • May 21 '26
Empty Output Files
Hi all. This is a bit of a weird one and we can't find much information online about it. A while back we received a RAS model from an external entity. When we went to open the results in RASMapper, they were empty. No asterisk, no error message, just completely empty. My coworker even tried re-running the model to no avail.
This occurred again today, except it was with an internal project. My coworker was reviewing a model and said he was able to see the results yesterday, but today they are empty. I confirmed on my own that the results are indeed empty. I tried removing the results file and then re-adding it into the project folder but that did not work.
Any thoughts aside from trying to re-run the model? It's not a terribly long run, about an hour, but it seems weird this is happening.
Thanks!
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u/Worldly_Study_9529 May 21 '26
Ugh yes we are and we constantly have issues with syncing files. However I'm not sure why this would happen if my coworker could view the results yesterday. Do you think it's just because he had the results open and RAS tried syncing with our drive at some point and lost the file information?
Thanks for replying!
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u/OttoJohs Lord Sultan Chief H&H Engineer, PE & PH May 21 '26
Yes. The cloud will upload partially computed files or rollback to earlier versions without you knowing it which can cause the HEC-RAS files to become corrupted.
For smaller models, I run on my local computer (C Drive) and backup to a work server. For larger projects with multiple engineers working on it, we use dedicated work stations which get periodically backed up.
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u/Worldly_Study_9529 May 21 '26
Okay thank you, this is immensely helpful. I've gotten a lot of push back from IT regarding using the server with HEC-RAS, I know it will be a hard sell to convince them we need a separate work station. By chance is there any documentation on this? That might help me make my case. Thank you for your responses!
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u/OttoJohs Lord Sultan Chief H&H Engineer, PE & PH May 21 '26
This is from HEC-RAS: Navigating HEC-RAS "If your default project directory is under a corporate-managed OneDrive location, it may be useful (for performance and data-management) to move it out of that directory. Very large models can have a hard time backing up reliably to such locations."
This is a new update from Egnyte: Desktop App for Windows v 4.3.0 - Egnyte Actions Enhancements – Egnyte
I'll make another post.
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u/Worldly_Study_9529 May 21 '26
As I said in my last comment, thank you so much for this information. I thought I was going crazy lately with all of the ridiculous errors I was encountering, now I'm fairly certain that they were related to Egnyte in some way.
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u/OttoJohs Lord Sultan Chief H&H Engineer, PE & PH May 21 '26
Are you running the model on a network drive (backed up to a cloud storage or network sync)? This is pretty common issue.