Community
This is another one of those things where different people will have differing opinions. Here's my take on it, apologies but I have quite a brutal opinion on this issue.
Disk space these days is relatively inexpensive, far cheaper than it ever has been. I genuinely can't see a valid argument for reducing the availability of Vault data to save a minimal amount of money in the grand scheme of things. This is the companies engineering data, it's life blood, it isn't something that should be treat with a blazé attitude. It absolutely deserves and justifies the cost of a new hard disk or two which likely costs about the same these days as a single monthly payment for the IT managers company car or that fancy tablet device he has for convenience. So if it was me, I'd be telling the IT manager to have a word with himself, do his job and increase the server disk space or buy a new server that can meet the demands of the engineering department which I suspect is earning the money that keeps him in a job. What could he possibly be spending his IT budget on in an engineering company which effectively relegates the actual engineering data to the bottom of the priority list?
All opinions aside, there are no hassle free methods to archive data out of the Vault, it's a Vault, by definition it's a storage system. Once data goes in, it's supposed to stay in there. You can reduce/manage the size by regularly purging the filestore and running scheduled SQL maintenance plans, other than that the Vault is supposed to organically grow and retain file history.
Just out of interest, what is the current size of your Vault? I mean specifically the full filestore size, database size and number of files in there? Also for reference, how many full time active users of the Vault do you have and how old is your Vault?
That's a small-medium sized Vault but as established, it isn't anywhere near the point of needing reduced. Just to put it into perspective my mobile phone has a 128GB memory card in it, your Vault is 143GB! It really is a sad and sorry state of affairs that there are people out there in control of Vault systems who have such a prehistoric dated outlook on technology. I feel bad for you.
As long as you run regular SQL maintenance plans against the Vault, it shouldn't ever slow down. My Vault has a 500GB filestore and a 30GB database, and it's as quick as a fresh new Vault. It needs to be on appropriate hardware and regularly maintained.
One observation though is that your number of files count is very high, that number includes all old versions (historical copies) of files too. If purging your current IT manager isn't an option, it might be worth running a full Vault purge if you haven't done that already 
Our Vault server is virtualised and allocated as much resource as we need from the host hardware, currently it has:
2.5TB storage split into C: 60GB, 😧 800GB, E: 1.6TB
The D partition hosts the Vault expandable components (SQL, Filestore etc), the E partition is purely to host the backups.
The server is Xeon E5-2640 v2 dual CPU with 32GB RAM, that was 128GB RAM at one point but was overkill so we reduced it still allowing for future expansion.
Currently we're on Vault Pro 2013 but I'll be migrating to 2015 over the next few weeks.
Backups are manageable by either backing up to a separate device if space is an issue, or if possible use the incremental backup solution. Our full backup is over 500GB in size and can take over 8 hours to create, so we do a full backup on Saturday and incremental backups mon-fri.
A secondary backup is taken by way of the server being virtualised, a regular snapshot is taken and streamed to an off site location as well as having a replica of our entire infrastructure running side-by-side for disaster recovery. Should the server literally pack in and die, a backup replica can be switched on and service resumes. This is all stuff I'm sure your IT guy is aware of and has planned for 
To be honest though I'm sorry but I can't really comment on the configurator as I have no idea what it is, who created it, how it works and what it does.
The "configurator" is made by me, what it does is create the body of tanks like these (see image).
With body i mean the head, cylinder parts & standard nozzle connections. All other items like saddles, lifting lugs & stuff are not included.
Number of connection 30 (containing 6parts each)
Number of cylindrical parts 46.
It has a detail drawing of each standard connection ready and generates a partslist, saw-list, purchased item list, laser-cutting list.
It's supposed to be configured by a excel-spreadsheet, but after the initial configuration it's mostly managed by inventor forms.
It set's all materials as specified in the excel-spreadsheet.
It does the trick, probably could be made better, but when the result is good nobody complains..
But then again this should not be a factor for vault as the majority in data is added to the "configurator" afterwords.
What kind of product is made at the company you work at?
Yea it's still difficult to judge whether that's quick or slow, but given how much time it saves over doing it all manually, I wouldn't grumble at a 15 minute wait!
The company I'm currently at (i'm a Vault consultant) design and build large subsea vehicles, trenchers, sea bed tractors, unmanned submarines, it's a big place!
Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.
Post to forums
![Autodesk Design & Make Report](https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/1350519iCB55845EBFC43016/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999" "Autodesk Design & Make Report")