Happy holidays everyone. I'm looking for some input from other more experienced SW users on this issue. Are there any negative consequences of removing revisions from the "vault"? I know that most will say archive your older revisions but our IT dept is saying otherwise. Let me explain a little more in depth.
From the beginning of SW and PDMW at our company our revision scheme has been simply Rev 01-99. Now, 3 years later, we have parts and some assemblies with 50-99+ revisions. We would like to just run one revision of each file, which now we know just to create a working copy i.e. Rev 01+. However, when we looked into archiving the older revisions I was surprised to see that archiving doesn't remove the revision from our vault.
We noticed that when we archived a revision the original was never removed from the "vault" it just created a smaller sized copy of the original and placed it in the archive directory. My PDMWorks book made it sound like the revision would be removed thus reducing storage requirements. If the revision wasn't removed how is it creating more storage space? We compared the two files and the archived version was at a reduced size, guessing zipped, but the original was the same. Other than creating a backup what did archiving accomplish?
Unless I missed something, a delete original revision option or something, I see no use of archiving with the exception of creating back ups. Our server is backed up once a week so we're set on that end. IT is suggesting that we delete these older revisions to clear space and hopefully improve performance via SW not having to deal with so many revisions. These older revisions would be saved on hard copy and stored in case needed. Furthermore they would be cut out in an orderly fashion as to not mix them up.
Bad idea? Is there something I'm missing? I'm looking for advice, input, or maybe a similar situation to prove or disprove that this is a good idea.
-Shaggy