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If you have your docs in a suitable version control system, this kind
of redundancy is not necessary. Consider:
A small portion of the document changes. Do you then copy *all* the
related files with updated version numbers? If not, where do you keep
a copy of which files are included in the current doc version?
A version control system tracks *all* changes and easily presents the
latest version of each document included. Its information includes
dates of file creation or update...and makes it a snap to keep up with
which versions are the latest and greatest.
To renumber as you have indicated merely invites confusion, for in my
experience somewhere along the line it will not be kept up
properly...and, meanwhile, you have little ability to really tell what
has changed and what has not. It is only a stopgap to include a
"change document" within the doc set...and, after four or five
versions have passed, navigating such a change doc to find where a
particular issue was introduced or eliminated is a total pain.
If you're paying for a large and complex system that includes
versioning, I suggest you simply keep it up and do periodic backups.
The rest of it is an unbelievably convoluted mess. (In fact, I spent
three weeks once trying to straighten out a large document base for a
Nortel group that had lost control of the version numbering in their
archives. This was triggered by running out of server space in the
midst of a software release, which I had to work around. After the
release and the cleanup I did, we had a comprehensive archive and had
reclaimed about 4/5 of the allocated server space.)
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