Ephemeral Warehouse

Abstract

This article highlights how can companies archive their 3D CAD files as their software races toward obsolescence. Digital designs, though, are created on software and computers that are outdated when they are delivered. Computer files can be hard to retrieve in as little as five years down the road. This is a big problem for the engineering community and, of course, for corporations, government agencies, and organizations that store information digitally—in short, for everyone. Most information today—not just engineering data—is created and stored digitally on computer systems that become outdated sooner than bread gets stale. Companies may also store blueprints or CAD documents as portable document files (PDFs) or as tagged image files (TIFs). These are 3D digital files that can be accessed fairly universally from any computer. Again, much is lost, including geometry, when swooshing a 3D file as flat as a pancake.