Archiving files for Advertising company

[shala]

Hiya,

I am working for an advertising agency and am wondering if anybody could give me some tips on advancing the current system I use for archiving client design files.

Currently all files are stored on the server. When the server fills up I burn all files to disk and then file them to a system called disk tracker. With this software I can then search for files by name and it will locate which disk it is on.

This system seems to work okay, but as the company is growing I am starting to get a huge pile of disks, and altogether the process is long and tiring.

I know allot of companies use this same method for archiving, but I thought I'd just see if anybody else has some better ideas.

[Bear]

Mac or PC setup or combination of the two?

[shala]

Mac based

[SharkFinStudios]

Shala,

Is it just an archiving system or do you use it as a backup as well? I think you have a good system in place. My only recommendation is to do it more often on a schedule than just when the server fills up. My old company had everything backed up to a server and had us delete the files off of our machines. Suddenly we have the computer HD fizzle out and we lost over a years worth of work. My boss and I had been saying we should backup our files once every month to DVD and THEN delete them off of the system. 20/20 hindsight. And guess what? Now they are doing that very thing.

I know the disks tend to build up, but it is a good way of not losing your hard work. Instead of having disks and their cases you may want to just have them in a catalog/album type format and stack the catalogs of disks.

Cheers!

[jimking]

CDs or DVDs? Shark mentions DVDs and that's a good way but not CDs, too small. There is a backup system called Retrospect that's very nice. It backs everything up in the background or preset times on digital tapes. I like disktracker, we use it too.

[urstwile]

We use a Sony DAT drive for archiving, and an external hard drive for backing up, both through Retrospect.

For the archives, I make two copies, one for onsite and one for offsite.

For the backup, I rotate the external hard drive every two weeks, so we always have a full backup + the one in progress.

You can set Retrospect to backup and archive via scripts, so you don't have to babysit the process.

[Weecutz]

yeah. I would probably get them to invest in some external harddrives... u can get like 40GB one for £30 or 300GB for £80... would be a lot faster, easier and you can just use the windows search function when you've the drive plugged in to search and see if a specific file is on it/them

[urstwile]

Depending on the size of the server, if you're doing incremental backups, get one that's about 2-3 times the size of your server. We actually back up the local workstations as well to the external hard drive, so the size of the external hard drives is 400GB.

Incremental backups will backup any file that's changed since the first time the backup was initiated, so depending on the backup schedule, you want to make sure you have a big enough one to hold all that info.

Go for DDS-4 if you're doing tape archives (should you go that route). You'll have less tape switching to do during the archive process. Not knowing how much stuff you archive in a shot, it's hard to say, but you can fit a lot of stuff on a DDS-4.