That is just one of the many ways to make SW files smaller for transfer. There are others, in no particular order or guarantee of effectiveness:
- move the part/assembly off the screen and save
- change to HLR wirefreame mode
- decrease image quality settings
- turn off setting to save tesselation data
- decrease the size of the SW window
- just do a save as with a different file name
- enclosing in a rectangular solid is better than a cylindrical solid because there are fewer triangles to display for the flat surface than the curved surface
- ecosqueeze or unfrag
- configurations cause massive file size issues, deleting configs and sending a design table separately to recreate the configs can help huge configured files.
- working rolled back can also cause immense file sizes because SW is saving body (parasolid) data for each rollback state. not sure how to purge this data, maybe the save as trick does it or ecosqueeze
I would only use these methods on parts that are being transfered via FTP or otherwise across the internet - I wouldn't do anything to remove previews from files being accessed regularly or archived files. Most of these techniques remove the preview data from the file, which can be annoying. Archive drives are cheap - I just got a 300 Gb internal drive for $90.
One of the new functions in SW07 which hasn't gotten much attention so far is the fact that it automatically creates a preview which is independent of the orientation or position the file was last saved in. That means some of the techniques above won't work for SW07 files. It seems like it changes to an isometric view, does a zoom to fit, and captures a preview image.