How to Protect the Integrity of Your Design Files with Storage Manager

There are a number of occurrences that can cause you to lose your work. How can you easily protect the integrity of your pcb design files at design time? Read on to find out.

You are in the zone today. You have been working on your design five hours straight and making huge progress. That layer stackup problem you were having…Solved! (Thanks to a great video on how to get the layer stack right.) The via perforated power plane… Conquered! Then you come up against one of the greatest PCB design challenges, the power outage… When was the last time you saved? How much work have you lost? You begin to dread the results before you know what you are dealing with.

Besides the unforeseen power outage, there are a number of unexpected occurrences that can cause you to lose your work, such as a system crash or a broken flash drive. You may even accidentally save a project file with unnecessary or unintentional changes made, causing you to lose your previous work and replace it with an incorrect version. This sort of thing can be incredibly stressful. So how can you easily protect the integrity of your PCB design files at design time?

The Altium Storage Manager

With the Storage Manager in Altium Designer^® you can eliminate this stress. The Storage Manager allows you to access both old and current progressing project documents, helping you save both time and money and providing you and your project managers a much-needed sense of relief.

The storage manager behaves as a workspace panel, providing you with a folder/file view of any project documents and any file management actions performed for the project. You can also view the timestamps on certain actions, notifying you when they were completed, and access the project’s overall behavior, as well as set individual project files as part of a repository.

Storage Manager events include the open document, last saved contents, and different versions of the file, which provides users full access to their previously performed actions for a particular project.

In the Storage Manager panel, users can view their current project and the associated files based on their set repository. Based on a particular timeline, users can view any action performed in the project files, including auto-saving to their local history or manually saving their current changes to a project. The core of this feature is that it doesn’t only behave as a log, but also provides users with access to any and all time-backup files as well.

Avoiding Disasters

Whether it’s caused by forgetfulness, a mistake, or an unforeseen disaster, you never know when something will happen to jeopardize the work you’ve done on a project. But with the Altium automatic and timed backups and the Storage Manager feature, you can recover all that time you would have lost redoing things, meet your deadlines more efficiently, and save both time and money.

Learn more about how to set up automatic and timed backups by downloading a free Storage Manager white paper.