Assembly displaying wrong parts.

[Roger_Roger]

About a year ago, when I started at my current job, I was given an assembly to modify and to maintain. It's very basic and has only 15 or so parts, not super difficult to make. The mistake I made was that I made several copies of it as "revisions" and placed them in several locations on my computer and on a network drive(not all of which were in zip folders). Recently, I reopened this project and several components broke, and I noted how sloppily I had managed my folders. Several new features were missing from the case, and a spacer that was in the file with the assembly refuses to show up in the assembly. Normal I would just remake the whole thing, but the bind is that it is for a project that is ETL C1D1, meaning that the drawings are controlled, and the working copy must be identical to the submitted documents until we decide to make a revision, which is costly. The drawings reference the assembly so now that the assembly is broken, the drawing is also broken, and we need to have a SolidWorks working copy of this device, even if it's just for the principle of the thing.

This leads to my questions for you good folks.
Have you ever had a problem like this in the past, and how did you fix it?
Are there any recommended ways/methods of resolving problems like this?

Regards,

 

[Cadasio]

It seems like you should look at using PDM in the future, or at the very least pack and go. This would stop this sort of thing happening. It is hard to help without seeing it but I would recommend you go file-open and click the broken assembly and then look at its references, you can change references if necessary to try and fix it.

 

[Roger_Roger]

It seems like you should look at using PDM in the future, or at the very least pack and go. This would stop this sort of thing happening. It is hard to help without seeing it but I would recommend you go file-open and click the broken assembly and then look at its references, you can change references if necessary to try and fix it.

Yep that is the same conclusion I came to and we now have PDM up and running. I did fix all the problems with that model and made some improvements, lesson learned.