The project deadline is looming. You (or someone in your engineering department) stayed late many nights to ensure that everything needed for the submittal was perfect. One day, you go to open a master design file and make the unpleasant discovery that all the references are missing. Someone moved something or renamed a drive. Who knows? But now you have a lot of tedious work ahead of you.

If this hasn’t happened to you directly, there is probably someone in your organization that has experienced this first hand and it was no fun.

Or what if you have to do some sort of data migration that will affect the drive letters or paths to a lot of files on your system (including hundreds of design files)?

Here is the problem: Server upgrades, data migrations, file system changes and user-generated changes happen. That’s part of a growing and changing organization. As these things occur, references go missing and that slows production and can really upset people.