Hello all,

This is my first post so it might not be in the right place but I have a serious question so this will work for now.

Our part files are a mess so we have unanimously decided to restructure our file folders and everything within them. Obviously moving parts around is very easy, and even if you have an assembly that loses its relations, it still has a fairly easy fix to reassign the relations. However, we have thousands of assemblies that have anywhere from two parts to a hundred parts, thousands and thousands of different parts to choose from. I'm sure many of you understand my issue here. While moving the parts around would be easy with a massive 'copy-and-paste', it would take a lifetime to put all of the assembly relations back together, quite literally.

I know about the Solidworks explorer, but you have to be moving the parts from the same file as the assembly (which they are in different folders already) and you can only move the parts one at a time, which as I said before we likely have tens of thousands of different parts that will need moved. This would again also take a lifetime do to. I watched a video on the Solidworks PDM, and I can sort of see how it would help to prevent my situation but I failed to see how it could possibly get me out of it.

I have read many forum posts, roughly 25% give a solution that I have already tried and it just won't work for one reason or another, and the other 75% of forums basically say that there is no good solution and we are going to have to live with our system the way that it is now. I am open to any suggestions. Even in regards to the techniques that I said don't work and you think they do, I would be welcome to you explaining how you think I am wrong and what the proper way to go about the method is. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I can't imagine that I am the first person in the world to have this issue.