SOLIDWORKS Design & Help

have to agree with he instructor,

went from AutoCAD to Solidworks

we started with 1 seat of SW, PDM was not needed.

when we went to three seats (18 months later) , we got PDM, added all the parts were added to the vault (PDM).

the iterations were done "outside" the vault prior to adding the parts.

we decided that it was "too much work" and had no benefit to have earlier iterations of the (over 4k) parts.

Ask YouTube

I also agree with the instructor as this would be a very "manual" process to recreate the history from a files & folders structure to a PDM system. The only viable option would be a very complex and time consuming program to automate this, but the end result would not be worth the time to create either. I would try to convince them to put the latest version in the PDM vault, and archive the older versions for manual retrieval if needed by a select few users or admins.

If you are just keeping them for the sake of Inventory, you can attach them as Foreign Documents in PDM, but if you reference and use these parts in future designs, then you need to work just the required files.

It is tedious but achievable.