on 1/6/08, Michael J Wise wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2008, at 9:14 PM, David Morrison wrote:
>> The site is a small landscape design house with currently 5 Macs and
>> three PCs. The Macs mostly run Vectorworks.
>
>> To date, they have survived with personal file sharing to access
>> files on other machines, and their network ran on a single Airport
>> Express.
Is it possible to wire the office? When dealing with large graphics files,
working over wireless is not ideal (to put it mildly). This will make
everyone's life much easier. With so few computers, you could do it
yourself with a few switches and some long CAT-5e cable.
>> The files are typically 100-150MB, and would typically take about a
>> minute to copy from one machine to another.
>
> They're auto-saving the files over the network?
> Is there no way to write to the local drive, and then make the final
> save to the network share?
>
Be careful if you do this - be sure that everyone knows not to work on the
same file at the same time. We used to use a "checked out" folder in our
project folders on the server for files that had been copied locally, so
others would know the server version was out of date.
>> The next step is to install a server so that all the files are in
>> one place,
>
> Maybe that's not the best idea?
> What about nightly rsyncs to the share?
> That would keep traffic down tremendously.
> Just thinking out loud....
I'm at an architecture firm, and you *definitely* should be keeping all your
files in one location. Whether you copy locally to work on a file is another
issue, but if you are using any teamwork or other group-sharing techniques
for individual files you will not be able to do this (I know ArchiCAD and
Revit have these options; I don't know about Vectorworks). Having
out-of-date files on the server can be a problem in design firms, since
people are frequently working on drawings that are referenced by other
drawings. The office is small enough that this should be easy to manage for
now, but may become a bigger problem when the office expands - better to put
a protocol in place now.
With regards to the recommendation to use Time Machine, has anyone else
tested it for a server application? I wouldn't think it was the right
choice for this situation, but I'm curious if others are using it. (We're
still happily and successfully using Retrospect, since the early 90s, but I
realize that someone starting now probably shouldn't go that route.)
I agree that the office needs to be included in deciding what the backup
will be - are you backing up nightly, keeping copies for one month, keeping
archives (how often will you archive?), etc. We try to keep three months
back in incremental backups, since people frequently don't realize their
file is corrupt or missing until later, but we don't have a consistent
archive for older stuff. With projects that last for years (and have the
potential to resurface years later), it's smart to keep archives in addition
to backups. You could also implement a policy of burning DVDs for archives
(check them after burning!).
I think a Mac Pro will be the best server option for you - no need for an
XServe, and you can easily use an attached RAID or other storage device. I
strongly recommend that you keep a boot drive separate from the file storage
volume(s). We used an old G4 with external RAID-5 for our file server until
just recently, and we have over 50 clients.
-Barbara
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