I will soon be starting a business doing CAD design, I will be getting Inventor. I am getting a brand new pretty powerful laptop to run the software on. I plan on dedicating the computer for CAD work and not other things to avoid compromising its performance. I need the computer to be portable which is why I am using a laptop. However, I would like to ultimately have both the laptop for travel CAD work and a PC for office CAD work.

One of my questions is: Can I install my one copy Inventor on both machines as long as I only use one of the machines at any given time?

Also I have seen how messy CAD file systems can get from various companies I have worked for. In particular I have run into situations where I have needed to save past revisions. Which seems to turn into a hassle because when you have part #898 you naturally want to save it as 898 and when you have a revision and you want to save both versions you end up with 898 REV A. But an assembly using part 898 is still looking for 898... Not 898 REV A. So there seems to be no easy way to save revisions. However, my understanding is that Inventor comes with Vault, which my understanding is that one of the features of vault is the capabilities to archive older revisions which is exactly what I am talking about doing.

So my next question is, does anyone know anything about using vault... any advice on what I need to do to set up everything and set it up right?

Lastly, I have seen filing systems that are a mess... drawings saved in strange places... drawings not where you would expect... some people save a drawing as REV A and some as REVA, Rev A, rev A, RA... etc... And again I understand that vault is supposed to help with file organization too...

So my question is again if anyone has any advice as to how to start out right?

I was at a company where their files were a mess... drawings were lost in the computer somewhere so people would just redraw it which resulted in 2 different copies saved in 2 different places on the computer... When I was hired they wanted me to "fix" it... there were thousands and thousands of files with hundreds of drawings in each file... It was an impossible thing to fix... and I don’t want to end up having to "fix" mine I want to start out right.