Model management in Inventor

Hi,

I am fairly new to Inventor but coming from finite element background which can easily produce heaps of models and data it raises the question: what are some best practices in model management in Inventor? I don't want to set myself up for a big mess to clean up later, I'd appreciate some real world lessons learned on how do you manage tens of projects with all its revisions and lifecycle, copying projects as starting points, standard components etc.

Is Vault the only go or is there a relatively reliable and low maintenance files&folders method as well?

Any ideas and pointers to relevant tutorials will be highly appreciated.