Freezing a Feature

Hope this is a reasonable wish...

The reason I want this is, I work for a tool and die company. There are situations that we may have to move stuff around in the die design, even after the die is built. While we move and update the design, well, the design is updated, but we don't know what went where. I might have moved the new feature to a location which still would interfere with the current feature (eg: moving a set of tap holes; the new location might interfere with the current pattern). On a big die shoe with hundreds of holes and cutouts, design changes like this are a real headache.

I'd like to have an option to just right click on a feature and say 'Freeze'. That should cut that feature from all the references, parent or child or whatever. Ofcourse it can give a warning about the affected features and let us handle it like a 'Suppress'.

Its pretty much like having an 'image' of the previous location. It'd be even nice if Pro grays out the 'frozen' feature to make it stick out. Also it should not be allowed to be referenced for other features and what not.

Anybody else here wished for something like this??

I don't have any specific feelings about the desire, but thought I'd ask the obvious...

You are aware that there are ways to make static or independant copies of topology (surfs, quilts, edges, etc.)?

anandel, I think that is a great idea, and I'm surprised they haven't incorporated that functionality yet. The closest thing is setting a feature to read only, and it freeezes everything before it also, and often times still regens with a change to a parent.

You can always iges out a wireframe or surface model and bring it back in for a frozen reference.

First, thanks all for your opinions. The suggestions to do a Copy Geometry and IGES-ing out are nice and I infact have used them too. Its just that they seem more of a work-around rather than a direct way of meeting the exact purpose of it, that is keeping a reference of something that is about to change.
Also, when importing an iges, one got to be a bit more careful as far as taking references for features that are built after that. 'might accidentally pick the imported surf instead of the actual part itself. Just weighing out the overall pros and cons, I just felt that it'd be nice if PTC develops something that's more of a dedicated Pro/E feature than our own mickey mousing.. Just my opinion.... rather "Wish"..

Thanks again guys.