PDM Vault Admin - Archiving Data

[woolly]

Does anyone has any code / API mods or suggestions for making archiving data any easier? SW tell you to structure your vault with loads of sub projects to keep it tidy and fast for access. The only problem occurs when you try to archive data, you can't select a top level project and apply the chosen archive option to it, you have to be at the level where the data is stored to be able to select it. So I have to go thro' every single project in our vayult individually to be able to achive data. It would be nice to be able to select the top level and select from there, any ideas??

Thanks

Woolly

SW2007 SP4.0

Project Design Engineer

Herbert Engineering

http://www.rjherbert.co.uk

 

[kcarpenter]

Woolly...information regarding your environment would be helpful. Is your vault on a workstation, server, etc.? Depending on where it's located there are a multitude of options for both hardware and software to do the job. What are you using to backup the data currently? I could suggest an number of options but I would think you'd like to use whatever hardware/software you already own.

Kevin Carpenter
CAD Systems Administrator
Invacare Corp.

 

[woolly]

Kevin,

At the moment the vault is based on a Windows 2000 server (to be upgraded next year to Windows 2008 server). It is a server that runs the whole site, and is backed up via DAT drive at the moment, but when it is updated is going to have a media drive (I think) to do the back ups.

Thanks

Woolly

 

[PDMAdmin]

Are you trying to archive data, or just do regular data backups? There's a difference between the two, and they have different purposes.

 

[woolly]

PDMAdmin - We are trying to archive data (i.e old revisions etc) from the main vault data.

Woolly

 

[PDMAdmin]

You can only archive one project at a time, according to the PDMW help file.

 

[woolly]

I undertsand this as i've now been thro' our vault and removed 37Gb of data. The main problem now is how to keep a check on whats been modified so that in the future I don't have to go thro' the whole vault again. SW tell you to structure you're vault to make it easy to access etc, but this doesn't help at all with the achiving of data. You can't really use the vault search tool to give you any productive results, and there is no way in vault admin to tell you this either. SW need to add more functionality to the search tool, and / or the archiving tool. There must be other people out there that are in the same boat as me.

Woolly

 

[PDMAdmin]

I know what you mean, but I hardly ever use the Archive function. It just has too many limitations, primarily the fact that it's difficult or impossible to manipulate a file in the vault that depends on an archived file. You have to restore the archived files, then work on the file you want. Too much of a hassle... I either leave the project there and change it to "Read Only" status, or I remove people's access entirely so the data is still there but they don't see the project in the vault listings. Hard drive space can become an issue, though.

 

[woolly]

I agree, just hope SW do something about it soon, our vault was getting up to about 90Gb so I had to something. Our server is being upgraded next year so that should help as we keep falling over and freezing as all the RAM was used on the server.