Vault Copy Design, The most controversial blog of all time (Folder Copy)

This is it – the folder panel and the art of copying from and to folders.  

I expect to get lots of feedback on this one, I held back to get some of the Copy Design basics out of the way, but wanted to make sure we covered this early on in our deep dives into Copy Design workflows.

It's unsurprising this is the topic I have heard most feedback on to date, given this is likely the largest departure we made to the original copy design workflows.  This overview though also comes with a challenge: to test for yourself the speed of copying files using this visual approach over the old find and replace commands.   The results we have found is for most, this is the faster approach – lets take a closer look though so you can decide for yourself.

Taking a simple example of an assembly with sub folder structures used to organize its dependents let's copy it to a new location.

The first thing we need to do if you don't already have one (and I have outlined this in the video below) is to create the new top level folder with a “Copy To” command.

Go to the Folder panel, it displays all the files and folders affected by this copy operation - selecting one of the sub folders in this example (can be a file too) we can select "Copy To".  This prompts us to select an existing folder or create a new folder in the Vault tree.  For this example we are creating a new folder called "Alternative – Padlock" under designs (A quick note that we are also looking at potentially adding a simple "create folder" option here in future releases). 

Your new folder has an asterisk on it because it hasn’t been created yet.  You will see with the copied folders we can rename these in place or, to Copy additional files simply drag and drop them into this new structure.

If the copy actions should be based on file location, simply select the folders (or individual files in those folders) and drag and drop to the new folder – you'll see the Copy state update in the main window.

Note too if you are copying all files to a single destination folder you can multi-select with Copy To and skip this step, but here we want to maintain the folder structure.

Your folders and files are now sent to the new location – done.  

Contrasting this with the find and replace command, generally the above process is faster and as we are visually creating the data, less prone to typos or incorrect replace actions.

While we believe this to be the simplest approach to copying files we recognize there are situations where the above process can become more complicated, so we are again looking at potential changes to the folder view in future releases which may permit the type of "find and replace" action we have in the file naming view (remember that post?)

But until then, take the challenge, keep letting us know your thoughts and happy copying!

Allan