What is the best practice for mass export of Creo data with large family tables?

[cswaner]

Greetings,

I am needing to perform a mass export of large set of Creo files.  These files are almost exclusively family table driven.  Parts, Assemblies, UDFs, Formats, etc. etc.

What is the best way to export all this data while maintaining it's integrity.

Thanks in advance,

Cam

Windchill 10.1 m050 with Creo 2.0 m120

[cswaner]

I guess I should clarify:

The data will not be imported into another Windchill instance, rather it will be used standalone outside any PDM solution.

So the question might really be, should I export using WC Export Manager or does this require using the Workspace Export?

Thanks again,

Cam

[cswaner · Accepted solution]

Summary:

I tried every method I could think of.  I really liked the idea of using the Export Manager as it was a nice way to collect all the dependencies and send it out into a nice package.  I was disappointed with this method.  Although small scale tests seemed to work exactly how I would expect, there were major problems when running a larger scale.  After about 12 hours of run time, the ZIP or JAR (tried both) which was created seemed to be corrupt.  At least from what I can tell, none of the compression tools I tried seemed to support the compression method used by Windchill.

I did not have time to troubleshoot the compression method beyond a couple of tries and 2 or three extract methods.  It was looking like I was going to have to "Brute-Force" export from the workspace.  I was projecting this to take about 60 hours with heavy monitoring.

I started the long process by downloading the PRTs on Friday before US labor day holiday hoping I would get the export completed by the time the users returned on Tuesday.  From the workspace I exported the PRTs (not too bad, went fairly quick), then the FRMs, GPHs, and LAY files.  I was not looking forward to the ASMs.

Three hours after I started the ASM download and export, I had only 8 assemblies exported.  Then it came to me, I already have the content out of the system in my local workspace (SID files) I just need to move them from there.  I had used a utility someone developed to help retrieve data from a corrupt workspace, why couldn't I use that to get data out of a perfectly good workspace.

I ended up using the WC FileRecovery tool developed by Ron Thellen to rename the SID files to the proper CAD file name.  I was finished in about two hours and I was able to spend the holiday weekend with my family.

[MikeLockwood]

Might actually be better to bring up in CAD, then use File, Backup to dump all the files to disk.  Once in RAM, becomes only a matter of the CAD workstation, not dependent on Windchill.

It's dependent on user procedure to make sure to Add to Workspace using As Stored instead of Latest, and to collect All Relationships, but if it solves the problem, may be worth it.