- [Instructor] With Solidworks PDM,
you have to realize that there's a difference
between deleting and destroying files.
So in typical workflows, working on a server
or a storage volume, you go in
and when you want to delete a file, you just right click,
hit delete, or just select it, one single click
and hit delete on your keyboard and delete the file
and that file would be gone forever.
In Solidworks PDM they have an added layer of protection
where you can delete files from your local vault view
but to truly remove them from your cache
and delete them from all of the vault views,
you have to do what's called a destroy command.
So let's take a look at that real quick.
I just go to File Explorer.
I'm logged in as my admin right now.
I'm going to to my design library
and down here I've got some ice luge assemblies.
These probably aren't appropriate for work anymore
so I want to delete them.
So I'm going to go ahead and hold down ctrl, delete that.
I've got a pint glass here, probably don't need those.
So I'm just going to hit delete on my keyboard
and you'll see that it's asking if you want
to send these three items to the recycling bin.
So I go ahead and do that.
Now I'm also going to take this light bulb,
hold down my shift key, and hit delete.
You'll notice that we've got the green folder
with an X through it and an exclamation point warning.
Now this the destroy function, is what I just called up
by holding shift and hitting delete.
And I'm going to say yes.
Now we don't see anything here so it's like it's gone,
but it still exists in the background.
So if we back up once, go to the design library.
Right click on that, go down to properties.
Your folder properties are a little bit different in PDM.
Here you can see some general information,
folder card data, just like your part files,
you have folder card data.
Permissions for people, group members.
And then over here, we can see deleted items.
So you can see I deleted some other items earlier.
I just deleted the pint glass, ice luge, and assembly.
Now if I want to, I'm going to hold down shift,
select all of them, right click, we can copy these files,
destroy these files, or recover these files.
So if we want to bring them back were we were,
we're going to hit recover, hit okay.
Now if we go back into our design library,
we can see that those files are back.
Now if I grab them again,
we're going to delete them one more time.
I'm going to go back up to the design library
and go into my folder properties again.
You can see they're listed.
This time I'm going to destroy them.
Right click and go destroy.
Now it's checking one more time,
are you sure you want to delete these three files.
We're going to say yes and now they're truly destroyed.
They won't exist on the vault here
or on the vault back on our server location.
It'll push this change through all of the vaults.
If you do accidentally delete a file,
you do have a way to recover it.
It's really easy so don't worry about that.
PDM gives you a lot of security in the background.
But if you need to clear out data,
like legacy data that's not applicable anymore
or is out of date or is just incorrect,
maybe you copied over a file and did a pack and go
into a folder that you didn't mean to
and you have to delete a bunch of data permanently.
Use the destroy feature by selecting the items,
holding down shift, and then hitting delete.