PDMWorks - Purging previous revisions

[jscottnh]

Does anyone have any tips or insights into good ways to purge early revs in a clean mannner?

We have been using PDMWorks for a little over a year and are nearing the production phase of our first product to be released using PDMWorks. I'd like to essentially purge all previous revisions of the models and drawings and only keep the latest copies in the vault. Once the product is released we will care about tracking the specific changes and revisions, but the iterations that got us to this point are not helpful and only unnecessarily grow the vault. I've looked into archiving, but it still stores the files in the vault so it doesn't really achieve what I'm looking for.

I'm a bit apprehensive to start deleting files and then re-submitting files to the vault because I have a very large assembly that we are going to release portions of at a time. This will require me to reconstruct the top level assembly each time I "purge" a subassembly.

 

[ctopher]

You can't delete past revs, only the previuos rev. It does not hurt to leave them, they do not take up much space.

Chris
Sr. Mechanical Designer, CAD
SolidWorks 05 SP3.1 / PDMWorks 05
ctopher's home site (updated 06-21-05)
FAQ559-1100
FAQ559-716

 

[pdybeck]

jscottnh,

I think you have the option of where you want to store the archived files using the archive option. The location for these files is set on the projects tab within the vault admin tool. As far as I can tell, I have the option of placing these files outside the vault. Straight from Joy Pineau's mouth (product manager for PDMWorks), the archive functionality will increase performance for large vaults that contain lots of revisions of files. Of course, if a previous revision is needed and has been archived, the vault administrator can easily restore it from the archive functionality within the vault admin tool. If you ask me, this is your best bet for getting what you want.

Pete

 

[PDMAdmin]

The main problem I have encountered with archiving is that if you do quite a bit of file manipulation (delete, rename, etc.), you will have to un-archive all the file references first. In my case, archiving became such a headache that I stopped doing it entirely.