PDM stands for Product Data Management. It's a system for organizing, versioning, and managing design files—especially important for CAD work where designs evolve and you need to track every change.
Enterprise PDM systems like Autodesk Vault, Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE, or Windchill cost thousands of dollars per seat and require server infrastructure. They're built for teams and provide features like:
These are powerful but overkill for a solo designer.
S3 PDM Vault is a lightweight personal PDM for solo SOLIDWORKS users. It gives you the core PDM features that actually matter for one person:
No approvals, no team coordination, no enterprise overhead. Just straightforward version control for your designs.
Git and S3 PDM Vault overlap, but they're built around different ideas. For SOLIDWORKS files, the differences matter more than they first appear.
Every Git commit captures the whole project exactly as it was, so git checkout <commit> puts every part, assembly, and drawing back to a consistent state. S3 PDM Vault records which versions went together in each check-in, but you'd restore them file by file.
You can explore a design variant on a branch or tag exactly what you sent a client. S3 PDM Vault has neither.
Git is used by millions of people and extremely well tested. S3 PDM Vault is a few hundred lines that only you maintain, so a bug in it is your problem.
You commit locally and push later. S3 PDM Vault needs a connection to check in.
Git keeps every version of every file on every machine. Each 250 MB part you revise ten times puts 2.5 GB into your local .git folder, forever, on every computer that clones the repository. Git LFS fixes this by keeping large files on a server and downloading only the versions you need. But it adds setup, and its storage is either on GitHub (which charges for LFS space and bandwidth quickly) or a server you host yourself.
It can't show a meaningful diff of a part file or merge two edits to an assembly, so you mostly get the storage and history parts of Git.
Switching commits rewrites the whole working folder. That fails partway through if SOLIDWORKS has files open, and it can confuse SOLIDWORKS if it has files cached.
Its mental model is the whole repository, not individual files. Staging, committing, pushing, and pulling is more ceremony than "check in this file with a comment," and TortoiseGit or GitHub Desktop help only somewhat.
Your PC holds just the current files, so there's no local history growing without limit.
Any cheap S3 bucket is the whole "server." There's nothing to run or maintain.
Its model matches PDM: individual files with version numbers and a comment on each check-in.
current/ is browsable, so you can get files out with any S3 tool, no Git knowledge required.
The storage format is plain JSON and files, simple enough to recover by hand if the app ever breaks.
Two Git-based tools solve the large-file problem more cleanly than LFS, and both can use S3 or B2 directly as storage:
Git tracks the history while file contents live in S3, and you only download the versions you ask for. It's very capable, but it has a steep learning curve and its Windows support is rough.
Aimed at data science, but it works for any large files. It's easier than git-annex, though still command-line oriented.
Either would give you Git's snapshots and branches without the storage bloat, at the cost of more complexity than S3 PDM Vault.
For solo SOLIDWORKS work where you want per-file versions, a simple GUI, and history kept off your PC, S3 PDM Vault is the better fit.
Git becomes the better choice if you find yourself wanting branches, or wanting to roll a whole project back to a known state. If it's mainly that second one, a "Restore this check-in" feature would be a small addition to S3 PDM Vault that would close most of that gap.