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Archiving your files
Greetings from the Land of the Maple Leaf!
Ok, so how do you store your sign files? If you’re anything like us, you have a “jobs” folder on your computer – only trouble is it eventually gets too full to easily navigate. Not withstanding we should back up (of course) it seemed a good idea if we could separate the “used” files into an archive folder, leaving the working “jobs” folder a bit leaner. With me so far?
Anyhow, the reason I’m writing all this is that I wrote a tiny piece of software that will move your files to an archive folder of your choice, even creating sub-folders for the starting letter of the filename, so you get all the ‘A’s filed together, all the ‘B’s, etc. You can access the software just by right-clicking a file and selecting “send to”…
It works a treat for us, so I thought I’d share. If anyone out there thinks it might be useful to them, just drop me a line and I’ll send you a copy.
Graham
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5 Replies
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I have a very simple system.
All our jobs have a number allocated to it. I open a sub folder in JOBS and save it there, I also IMMEDIATELY save a back-up file to a 100MB ZIP disk. The size of the sub folder is basicly all what I can get on the zip disk, say if you start at No.1 I lable it #1 to 100 (or whatever number is the last to fill the disk
I then simply lable the next sub folder #101 to ***I leave all the folders on the hard drive for instant finding and only revert to the disks in an emergency. Once a zip disk is full I also make a back-up of the disk so I have a copy in the event of a complete disaster, ie disk corruption or damage. I done this after accidently wiping over a 100 files of my backup disk after a hard drive crash.
We all learn the hard way 🙄
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I have a really simple system that works for me and allows me to quickly find customer files no matter how old they are.
Every month I create a new directory, eg. November 2004. Any work in progress is saved in this directory (each customer will have his own sub directory within this directory). Any work still in progress at the start of a new month is copied (re-saved) into the next months directory.
When backing up I only need to back up the current month (as previous months are already backed up).
To find a customer file, I only need to look at that customers history in my accounting system. I find the month when an invoice was raised for a particular job and can quickly find the artwork relating to that invoice which allows me to quickly find file for repeat orders.
It works for me and has done for more than 8 years, I can still find files for work I did 8 years ago.
I have described my method once before on these boards and was criticised for using a complicated system that was impractical 🙄 .
However, If you take the time to read carefully what I have just described you will find my system is actually not complicated at all but is very quick and simple and easy to back up
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We create a folder for each client.
Weekly or monthly it’s copied automatically to a second internal HD. (a Mirror copy).
Each six months or so, it’s backed up to a DAT and we create two copies.
That’s bulletproof.
Aitor
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Unless your computer is struck by lightning, drowned in a flood or hacked to death by a deranged axeman 😉
Cheers, Dewi
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Because we use ancient files every day, some over twelve years old, we can’t archive on a time basis.
We keep a current folder inside which is a folder for each client. When we don’t think we will be doing any more work for a particular customer, because they’ve gone broke or whatever, we move their folder from the current folder into an archive folder.
That way, any file we are likely to use today is in the current folder which is not cluttered up with loads of obsolete stuff, but any old file we might have a call for is instantly to hand.
I back the lot up to DVD when I remember, about six times a year. I know that’s not ideal but we don’t generate that many new files, we just keep cutting existing stuff, so if I lost a couple of months work it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
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