Projects, workspaces, and automatic saving

A zCAD.Online project is the working home for a product or engineering job. It keeps parts, assemblies, drawings, and the people allowed to work with them in the same context.

Use the project as the boundary

The published file structure is Folder > Project > Part / Assembly / Drawing. Folders help organize the account; the project contains the actual design set. Use a separate project when the product, customer, ownership, or access group is different. Keep related parts and drawings together when they must change and be reviewed as one product definition.

Do not create a new project for every small edit. That turns revision history into a collection of disconnected copies. Create a new boundary when the work really has a different owner or purpose, not because the filename needs another suffix.

Create files people can recognize

Inside an existing project, create the Part, Assembly, or Drawing that the work requires. Use names that describe the component or document, and keep temporary experiments clearly marked. Names such as final-final or new-part make sense for a day and become expensive later.

• Name components by their engineering role, not by who created them.

• Keep test geometry separate from the file that represents the current design.

• Check the target project before importing, copying, renaming, or deleting a file.

What automatic saving does—and does not do

Automatic saving reduces the risk of losing ordinary modeling progress, but it is not a substitute for a clear design milestone. Wait for the active command to finish before closing the tab, and check that the expected state is visible when a change is important.

Before a risky edit, a review, or a manufacturing handoff, make the current state understandable to the team. Record what is being changed and why, then use the available version history rather than creating an unmanaged file copy as a backup.

A clean handoff

When someone else takes over, point them to the project and the exact Part, Assembly, or Drawing. State whether the model is exploratory, ready for review, or approved for a downstream task. Cloud access keeps everyone near the same data, but people still need to know which state carries engineering authority.