I am needing a quick & effective way to rename Assemblies, renaming the parts within the assemblies while keeping the references to the detailed drawings for each of them.

We are redoing our part numbering, so I have MANY (approx 4500 parts/assemblies/drawings) that I need to rename. When I rename a part or assembly I want to make sure the detailed drawings also gets renamed. Also when I rename a part within an assembly I want to make sure the part keeps it’s link to the assembly and to the detailed drawing.

I am wondering the most effective way of doing this? Like I said I have many parts, I have only ever done with once and a while with parts/assemblies through explorer right clicking and using the ‘Solidworks’ rename options. But this takes a long time (approx 15 mins per part) Is there another way? Does it take me so long because I am on our server? Should I copy the files over to my local drive and do it that way?

Also I need to keep the old file, but I can always copy all files into an archived folder so they get kept until I am finished with them if need be.

Let me know if you know of a way of doing this. Thank you