I work in a corporate environment. Everything is kept on a server. The repository is used to allow file versioning, attaching other documents that pertain to the design, etc.Why use a Repository? Honestly I really do not see the point because CD's and Thumb Nail Drives are so Cheap these days. Heck you can buy an 8 GB stick for under $100 from SanDisk, or even a portable hard drive.
Not an internet server, the repository runs on your own internal server on your own LAN. Internet Service go down? What do you mean? Ours is guaranteed to have 99.9% up-time or something like that. They send us monthly reports and discout our charges for down time. It's usually down not more than a few seconds a month, if that. My brother works at a major data center. Yahoo's server went dark for 3 seconds, and they nearly lost the entire Yahoo account over it. If you need mission-critical internet service, it's available.I am a bit picky when it comes to placing proprietary parts on a server. What if your Internet Service went down??? I guess your out of luck then.
All those are fine if you work alone and your data is not mission critical to a multi-million dollar company. We run onsite backups to hot-swap hard drives for short-term and long-term backup, as well as offsite backups with an encrypted data protection service.Buy a few 2GB USB's and tag them. Easy to store, lock in the safe, or hang around your neck with a cord.
Repositories and Vaults are a good idea, but I prefer to protect my work in a Fire,Water Resistant Safe with back-ups for each one.
I'm sure it was. But there are several other products out there that are several times better than Alibre. Changing from Alibre to Solid Edge paid for itself in about 3 months due to the increased productivity.As for your personal issues with Alibre, you like everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
I think it is great for Designing Parts, Fixtures, Tooling, and Assemblies. Besides, it is way better than what I was using.
But the number and frequency of defects they have is a huge problem. Literally every time I used Alibre, I'd find at least one defect to write up, sometimes multiple. Then they would always call because they could not recreate the problem, and want me to send them a snapshot of my repository. I'd say "Uh, it's about 10 GB now." Their answer was "Oh, well that's part of your problem. You should split that up into 4 or 5 smaller repositories." Bear in mind, this is a small company with only about 6 or 8 product lines. If I tried to load the data from a previous job, it would make it completely unuseable. We had hundreds of designs. The total data volume was in the hundreds of gigabytes.
And it does a lot of totally stupid stuff - here's one - it was when I'd first started working for this company - I emailed some dwgs I'd done at home. My boss called and said "Um, where did you learn to dimension drawings?" Me - "Why, what's wrong?" Him - "Well, you have multiple '0' datums on this drawing with ordinate dimensions." Me - "No way, let me open it up."
It was Alibre. It was adding 2 or 3 0 datums at random locations all on it's own which made the drawing useless. And of course, Alibre could never recreate the problem. Their "workaround" was a ridiculous manual process that resulted in dimensions that would no longer update if the part changed. We had to just stop using ordinate dimensioning completely.
Alibre is the best bang for the buck for single parts or very small assemblies, no question about it. Once you start getting into assemblies with 100 or more parts, and your repository grows like ours did (over 8 GB in a few years), it starts getting too slow to work with. Silly stuff, like double-clicking on a dimension to edit it would take 10 seconds. Then another 10 seconds to apply the new dimension. In other systems that's an almost instantaneous change. And Solid Edge does still have defects. But they are much more minor and completely predictable, and the same workaround will work every time. And they also come out with service packs every month or two.
So if you're a one man shop where time really isn't money, or you're just designing single parts for machining or very small assemblies, Alibre is probably all you need. If you are part of an engineering group where a large part of your expenses are payroll for your designers, you will save a lot of money with one of the other programs, even though they are more like $7,000 instead of $1500-$2,000.