Sounds like a good project for school, as well as for the local organization.

As long as you use FILE+SAVE MANGEMENT whenever you copy or SAVE AS, then the links should be remain good. If you just copy the folder, the links probably will be broken!

Publishing your parent geometry and only using published geometry to create links will help tremendously if the links do become broken.

If you have 2000 parts, I also suggest organizing the data into several sub-products.