Keith's method works pretty good and I am thinking of borrowing it.
Purging is an interesting beast. Like with anything else, different companies will have their reason to purge or not to purge. For Keith, Cab, T-Bear, they work in smaller companies. They know Cadd, Most of their drawings stay in-house. Typically I would believe their drawings stay fairly clean and error free. I also don't believe they perpetuate any one drawing, as in most jobs are unique and they won't re-use files over and over again. Cab might be an exception with his houses.
I work in Retail. I can take one store(set of files) and use it on 20 to 50 locations. As in once store 1 is done, we take those files and create store 2. 2 might be a flip of 1. 2 might me a mirror of 1. After you get to the 20th store, it could be back to the original. Yes, we do keep track of what happens at each store and will take store 1 to create store 4 if it is identical or a closer start point.
In Civil, a site topo will be perpetuated for a very long time. Often between platforms and many different firms. let alone all the 3rd party applications Civil people will use with the different platforms. This is where we purge, audit and recover a lot.
I have to post a lot of drawings to client websites/ftp sites. Bandwidth is money. To help bandwidth, I purge drawings to reduce file size. For one particular client I can reduce files size by half. Instead of sending 100MB, I only send 50MB. Just think how that will effect your transfer time or your harddrive space. 1 of our file servers holds 322GB. This is not 100% drawings, but I bet if I purged all the autocad file's on the server, I would get a 25% reduction in size.. maybe 80GB...
Pieter
