I have done about 4 board designs so far and now am thinking about organization.
Schematics, PCB, Component, Pattern files are all over the place. How can they
be consolidated into a project?
How do I archive each of my projects with diptrace?
Archiving Projects
Re: Archiving Projects
I like to put all of my custom files into a parent folder on a drive other than the system drive (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace). Within this parent folder would reside two subfolders named "My Libraries" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries) and "Projects" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\Projects).
The "My Libraries" folder (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries) would contain all of my custom library files inside subfolders named "3D" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\3D), "Components" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Components), "Datasheets" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Datasheets), "Patterns" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Patterns) and "Spice" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Spice).
The "Projects" folder (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\Projects) would contain subfolders named for each project. One example might be a project named "Amplifier-3" with a Win-10 path of E:\DipTrace\Projects\Amplifier-3. Another might be a project named "12345-6789" with a Win-10 path of E:\DipTrace\Projects\12345-6789. And yet another might be a project named "Display Rev-B" with a Win-10 path of E:\DipTrace\Projects\Display Rev-B. Inside each project subfolder would be found the native schematic and board files and all related manufacturing files needed to produce the PCB.
With this arrangement it's easy to back up all of your important files by merely copying the parent folder (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace) to a different drive somewhere.
I'm not trying to say this is the best way to organize everything, but it's the way I prefer to do it. Your mileage may vary.
The "My Libraries" folder (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries) would contain all of my custom library files inside subfolders named "3D" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\3D), "Components" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Components), "Datasheets" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Datasheets), "Patterns" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Patterns) and "Spice" (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\My Libraries\Spice).
The "Projects" folder (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace\Projects) would contain subfolders named for each project. One example might be a project named "Amplifier-3" with a Win-10 path of E:\DipTrace\Projects\Amplifier-3. Another might be a project named "12345-6789" with a Win-10 path of E:\DipTrace\Projects\12345-6789. And yet another might be a project named "Display Rev-B" with a Win-10 path of E:\DipTrace\Projects\Display Rev-B. Inside each project subfolder would be found the native schematic and board files and all related manufacturing files needed to produce the PCB.
With this arrangement it's easy to back up all of your important files by merely copying the parent folder (e.g. Win10 path E:\DipTrace) to a different drive somewhere.
I'm not trying to say this is the best way to organize everything, but it's the way I prefer to do it. Your mileage may vary.
Tom
Re: Archiving Projects
Same as TomG but I have the DipTrace 3D images on my Terabyte drive and all the other diptrace WORK files on c:\diptrace. Archive is the Windows File History, on major projects I use export ascii and GIT for file versioning.