Graphics Backup share solution

[craigie b]

Hiya,
I work for a software house and up till this week was personally responsbile for all in house graphics, be it adverts for print, web, 3d animation, real time 3d models, post production etc. Now I have a new guy working with us I'm at my wits end about finding a suitable backup solution which would allow us to both share work. Given the nature of the work many pieces get reused from medium to medium and my boss insists I use CVS to back work up but I'm finding this unsuitable and the file sizes are to big (60 gb and increasing).

Can anyone recommend a good solution fo rbacking up data and sharing it between a team of designers?

Many thanks
Craig

[Keyare]

Simply a shared drive on a machine with a raid. CVS keeps redundant copies and would get enormous!
Create a well organized set of directories.

You could rotate tapes for daily or weekly backups. I find backing up to DVD ROM every couple months makes retrieving older files a lot faster than tape. Easier to find too.

[LeftBrain Artist]

Organize all files, burn to CD or DVD, use those disc to create a catalog using Extensis Portfolio or Cumulus that resides on a common server that you can use to find what CD or DVD the file is on. Or you could even create a database or excel sheet that does something similar. If you have an automatic backup system, let it backup your harddrives on a daily basis - but first get that 60GB mess straightened out and put away.

Depending on how busy you are, and what state of organization or disorganization your files are in, getting this straightened out could take a very long time. From the sounds of things, you should plan on having an archive system in place and in use within 6 months to a year. This can be done if you dedicate 4-6 hours a week on this project.

The important thing is to develop an organizational system that makes sense not only to you, but to others as well. I've had to deal with this situation in my first job, where I signed on to be assistant to the solo in-house guy in a corporation. My first day he let me know that he had put in his two weeks notice the prior week, so I had about 7 days to learn CorelDraw, and get comfortable with a PC design environment (prior to this I was almost exclusively Mac and Adobe). The next 4 months, I spent a lot of time organizing his files, which were very poorly organized. To his defense - he never had a reason to organize them, because he knew where everything was at. Still, there were times I wanted to strangle him for piling thousands of files in a directory seven to twelve levels deep with duplicate files, misnamed files . . . bad, bad memories.

If you haven't given much attention to an organizational system yet, or even worse, haven't organized your work directory at all, you're in for a big job. Take some time to research exactly how you want to solve this problem. Make sure things you do today wont be able to come back and bite you in the ass.

[craigie b]

hi guys,
cheers for the responce. Your advice is much appreciated. In my defence the stuff is reasonable organised as I've forseen the potential headache further along the line. In terms of digital asset management is there any software that would be recommended?

Many thanks
Craig

[brylee]

Hiya,
I work for a software house and up till this week was personally responsbile for all in house graphics, be it adverts for print, web, 3d animation, real time 3d models, post production etc. Now I have a new guy working with us I'm at my wits end about finding a suitable backup solution which would allow us to both share work. Given the nature of the work many pieces get reused from medium to medium and my boss insists I use CVS to back work up but I'm finding this unsuitable and the file sizes are to big (60 gb and increasing).

Can anyone recommend a good solution fo rbacking up data and sharing it between a team of designers?

Many thanks
Craig

We use this online storage (http://www.ibackup.com) service for our backup needs, it has a Lock/ Unlock feature that enable proper communication between our shared users. They can easily understand whether a file is being reserved for modification by another user.

[TheBluePanda]

My companies backs up everything to tape, as well as dvd. We have over 120 DVD's full of client projects and source documents. We then search for the files using Disktracker, which specifies the associated DVD.

As for live files, we have an organized structure on one server that everybody draws from.

[reuber1]

Arghh, almost a year...made it just shy of 11 months without being "necromanced."