Tech Tip: How to Safely Delete Obsolete Designs with Onshape

As you develop products in Onshape, your document may accumulate outdated Part Studios, Assemblies, Drawings, and other tabs. Keeping these outdated concepts can make your workspace messy, harder to navigate, and confusing for your team. It can also slow performance by making documents unnecessarily large and complex.

Deleting unused designs helps keep everything organized and easy to use, and ensures your teammates see only the most current concepts. If you ever need to look back at earlier work, you can always use Onshape’s Document history.

Delete What You No Longer Need

When you know you no longer need a design concept, delete the old tabs rather than leaving them in your workspace. There’s no need to make extra copies or rename tabs as “OLD” or “Backup” before deleting. Onshape saves your changes and keeps a record of tabs in the document history.

Pro tip: Create a version to help locate these items if necessary.

Restoring Earlier Versions

To view or restore a deleted design concept, open the Versions and history panel and find a version from before you deleted it. Keep in mind that by default, restoring from history restores the entire document, not just one tab.

If you only need a specific tab, perform the following steps:

1. Expand the Versions and history panel.
2. Right-click the version with the deleted tabs and select Restore to Main.
3. Change the Overall restore strategy to Keep Main.
4. Find the tab you want to restore, and in the dropdown menu select Replace.
5. Click Restore.

Keep the Current Design Organized

Keep your document tidy so you and your team can focus on what’s important. Get rid of outdated concepts to reduce clutter and keep your document running smoothly. If you ever need to go back to earlier work, use document history to restore deleted tabs.

This Tech Tip helped you learn how to keep your workspace up to date and organized by safely deleting obsolete and unused tabs.

Interested in learning more Onshape Tech Tips? You can review the most recent technical blogs here.