Archive Vault

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I have been tasked with carrying out a huge clean up of our Vault. There are hundreds of old jobs and templates that need to be archived and a huge library of common parts that I need to reduce to keep our procurement department happy (every designers worst nightmare).

So far I see my options are to:

Remove these files from Vault and copy them onto a drive our company has dedicated to archiving

or

Create a new Vault called Archive and move the files to here.

I'm more inclined towards creating a new Vault so that they are still searchable through Vault & can be referenced when needed but they are not available for use.

Is there a quick way I can take a snapshot of what's in our current Vault and clone that over to the new one? I'm not concerned about losing the part history of these files as we purge files regularly. This way I can delete all the files I don't want from our working Vault until my hearts content and be assured that I'm not deleting anything that isn't archived already.

A potential problem I see is that some old jobs that are not yet old enough to be moved to the archive Vault may contain some common parts that have been moved to the archive Vault, which means dreaded unresolved/missing file links when opening up old jobs! However to get around this, I'm thinking I could map the common parts folder of our Archive vault and add this folder to the library of our working vault project file.

Interested in anyone's thoughts on how to set this up or if there is a better way to achive what I need but still have that searchability that Vault is brilliant at.

Thanks

[Neil_Cross]

Unfortunately there's no proper archiving utility, another thing that people need but Vault lacks.  There is no right answer either, you kinda have to do whatever suits your requirements.  The easiest option is to take a backup of your live vault and then restore that into a separate server and have that as your backup of the files, then you can delete them out of the live vault... but then you'd need a PC/server to hold that on.  

[Anonymous]

Thanks Neil, why do you suggest restoring to a separate server?

[johannes.bauer]

Hello,
please be aware that there is an ideastation entry on that you might to give Kudos for:
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/vault-ideastation/vault-project-archiving/idi-p/3904079

Best Regards

[Anonymous]

The autodesk re-seller we have our subscription service with has strongly recommended not to use multiple vaults as it only causes a bigger mess in their experience. As we are only on Vault Basic they have recommended we upgrade to Vault Workgroups to archive files properly & keep everything in the same Vault.

I understand the benefits of this in keeping part history & relationships between parts. However for me this is a luxury more than anything (and an expensive one at that) one my manager is not prepared to do any time soon. I think I can achieve what my company needs by creating a seperate Vault for archiving. I wouldn't be too concerned that the two Vaults would not communicate with each other or be able to share files, the purpose of my task is to seperate old files so that they are not available in our live Vault! We purge our files versions regularly so I'm not fussed about all the archived files losing this history.

I guess one concern I have is when I move my files into the Archive vault will they lose their relationship with each other? For example if I move a batch of old working files and a batch of library parts to my archive Vault, will the working files retain their relationship to the library parts when I open the model up? In vault will it show me where these library parts are being used?

[Neil_Cross]

There is nothing in Vault Workgroup to assist with archiving, the only thing I can imagine they're referring to is the ability to put the files onto an obsolete lifecycle state but that is definitely not archiving anything.

Honestly it's more trouble than it's worth to put these files into another Vault, there's no mess with having more than one Vault but there will be plenty of hassle trying to get your old files over there.  If you still go ahead and do that, the files will keep their relationships with library parts as long as you upload them into the second Vault via Inventor or the autoloader.  But you'll lose the version history from the live vault.

[karthur1]

Not sure of exactly how to set this up, but there needs to be a way to either pull out the old files... or at least compress them so that they take up less space on the server.

We are running into this now as our Vault database grows and grows.  Our IT guys are screaming about the size of the server.  Our filestore is just north of 300GB.

Kirk

[Neil_Cross]

Oh no, 300GB!! Someone needs to tell them that mobile phones now have 128GB of internal fixed storage, excluding SD Card increased storage, my laptop has nearly 2TB of storage, but 300GB on a critical server is causing a freak out?

If it helps, show them this.  This is probably going to double over the next couple of years and unsurprisingly, our I.T will be instructed to throw more disk space at the server when that happens.  We tell them what we need to do our jobs, I personally think there's been a failing somewhere when I.T are telling the company to ditch data because of I.T.

[karthur1]

Neil,

Our vault filestore is 300GB and we also do a weekly backup that is stored on the same server. So there is another 300GB of used space.  In all, there is 60GB left on a 1TB drive. That is whats causing them to freak out right now over.  But I do hear what you are saying and they will just have to find a way to deal with it for now.  Adding another 1TB to our storage would work wonders.  At some point in time however, we will have to take a look at how large we want this thing to grow.

We may be able to purge some of the older vault versions, but I would rather not do that right now.

Thanks,

Kirk

[Neil_Cross]

Yea we do the same.  So for this Vault we have roughly 750GB as the live data, then we do a full backup on Sunday, then incrementals Monday thru Friday.  Each incremental has the full 60GB database in so our backups are roughly 1TB.  We then move that backup into a B folder and create another set next week.  So there's always two full backups as well as the live data at any one time, nearly 3TB worth of data.

Virtual servers are the way to go, you can just bang new disks into the host and allocate increased storage without any fuss.  

[karthur1]

We just do a full backup each Sunday. In the past, we would keep older backups like you are saying, but now we don't.  They have assured us that they are backing up the entire server (including this backup) off site each week.  So, if something catastrophic did happen the most we would lose would be one week.

I will push them to add a drive.  No telling what they will charge us for that.

Thanks

[swalton]

I hope your backups aren't on the same drive as the production filestore. 

We had the production filestore RAID array fail two weeks ago.  If the backups had been on that array we would have been in a bad place.

Happily, all the servers are VMs and all the data are mirrored to a separate on-site SAN as well as an off-site one. Our IT had everything restored by the start of the next work day.  Nothing like a real-world test of your backup procedure.

Back to the subject of this thread:

Is there any value in changing the filenames or descriptions of the obsolete parts?  Or checking them out to the "OBSOLETE" user?  Purge the old versions if you want to shrink the Vault some and train people not the use the OBSOLETE stuff?  You could even set up some custom searches that filtered out those components.  It would not be as nice as using Vault Workgroup or Pro with Lifecyles but you would not have to buy those versions.

[karthur1]

swalton,

Yes our backups are on the same server as the filestore.  I have discussed this several times with our IT about the "What-if" scenarios.  They assure me that the entire server is backed-up off site, so that if anything did go south, they would be able to recover the backup from there.

I am currently using Vault Pro.  I have never used the "obsolete" state before.

Kirk