Storing Customer Files

xcelprint

Well-known member
Hello all,

We are a small digital / offset shop. Our pre-press is pretty small with a mac-mini and macbook pro mainly running Indesign, Photoshop, and Acrobat. Here is our present procedure... please comment with ideas to improve our set-up.

Active jobs are on the desktop of the mac-mini.

After sending approved pdf files to the xerox 700, the Indesign file is packaged along with the pdf print file and we put this in alphabetical folders on the desktop of the mac-mini.


The problems I see are:
(1) The desktop is always full of stuff. Never seem to find time to keep it orderly and organized.
(2) Finding jobs is tough.
(3) No back-ups.

Would appreciate your ideas for our small shop. Maybe file with job # on a monthly DVD?

Thanks,
Robert
 
Stop using the Desktop. It's rings of people who cannot navigate a simple folder system. (What's on my desktop? Nothing.)
We are a small shop with perhaps thousands of customer files archived. I have mapped a drive on the network and named it Customer Files. You can create a "Customer Files" folder anywhere you like, just give it full share rights if you have more than one workstation.
Within Customer Files are 26 folders; A thru Z. Within each alpha folder are the unique customer folders. It works well.
An "Art" file in each customer folder for logos and folders for Stationary, Business Cards (with a sub folder for pdf proofs which become art files for imposing) and additional folders as needed...perhaps a "Document Fonts" folder in each. Personally, I create a folder as needed; I do not want to see more than 5-15 items in a folder.
You can get by with a simple external drive with backup software installed.
 
IMHO you should never have more than 20 or so things on your desktop . . .

make a folder on a hard drive for "work" or whatever name you like inside that make alpha folders and then inside that make customer folders and inside those make a folder for each job we use a job# and a descriptive title for them this way we don't have to package them since all the items are already in the "job folder" and the fonts are just living on your system.

Searchable by job # and if that doesn't work you can manually search for the job by the descriptive title -

Has worked for us for the last 25 years can pretty much find any job in less than a minute. As for back up get clone software and another hard drive or use time machine and another hard drive
 
Hello all,

We are a small digital / offset shop. Our pre-press is pretty small with a mac-mini and macbook pro mainly running Indesign, Photoshop, and Acrobat. Here is our present procedure... please comment with ideas to improve our set-up.

Active jobs are on the desktop of the mac-mini.

After sending approved pdf files to the xerox 700, the Indesign file is packaged along with the pdf print file and we put this in alphabetical folders on the desktop of the mac-mini.


The problems I see are:
(1) The desktop is always full of stuff. Never seem to find time to keep it orderly and organized.
(2) Finding jobs is tough.
(3) No back-ups.

Would appreciate your ideas for our small shop. Maybe file with job # on a monthly DVD?

Thanks,
Robert

I would suggest a separate drive with two folders;
01) In progress
02) Archive

Maybe a bit over simplified, but it's pretty clear what the status is.

Every job should be stored by its job number. In one shop we did something like this:
000000 - 099999
100000 - 199999
200000 - 299999
etc.
But at that shop all jobs had a six digit job number

Another shop used a system like an Army supply depot where everything had a code that was easy to decipher.
Some shops do it by customer name, then by date like 20150217 or 021517 (yyyyMMdd or MMyyDD)

By job number is the simplest. Just be sure to break it up into logical segments to make searching manually a bit easier.

As for backups, well that's a very different topic.
 
Stop using the Desktop. It's rings of people who cannot navigate a simple folder system. (What's on my desktop? Nothing.)
We are a small shop with perhaps thousands of customer files archived. I have mapped a drive on the network and named it Customer Files. You can create a "Customer Files" folder anywhere you like, just give it full share rights if you have more than one workstation.
Within Customer Files are 26 folders; A thru Z. Within each alpha folder are the unique customer folders. It works well.
An "Art" file in each customer folder for logos and folders for Stationary, Business Cards (with a sub folder for pdf proofs which become art files for imposing) and additional folders as needed...perhaps a "Document Fonts" folder in each. Personally, I create a folder as needed; I do not want to see more than 5-15 items in a folder.
You can get by with a simple external drive with backup software installed.

I can't stand having files and short cuts on my desktop. That's what the pretty desktop background images that come with the operating system are for. We have a nearly identical setup (we are a very small shop as well, less than 4 employees). All our files are stored on a NAS box with folders like, Art Files, Print, Send Out and New Orders. The New Orders folder is our In Progress folder. All incoming files get dumped there for sorting and preflight. Every computer on the network can access it. Like Pdan, Art Files are stored alphabetically.

Mattbeals is correct, backups are a whole 'nother topic. But in a nutshell, you'll want an onsite backup, an offsite backup and a disaster recovery plan.
 
As military friends had drummed into their heads in EOD school: Two is one, one is none.

Two copies of your important business data. Not one, but two.

Also ,no well conceived plan survives first contact. Test your disaster recovery planto see if it works or not, and if so, how well.
 
For backing up you should have one that is nearby should you need it in a hurry. I would the recommend you have a second off site. Even if it just a portable hard drive you take to work once a week for a full back up.

Every job has to have a job number. Use that in all file and folder names.

Keep live orders away from stuff that's pending or in development. We keep development stuff in A to Z client folders. We keep the live stuff by job number. After a month or two the live jobs get archived. Client folders get cleaned up and archived during quiet spells.
 
We don't keep customer job folders on our local workstations, all job files are on a shared server and we work on them over the network. Files are organized like so; File server is arranged by customer - each customer has its own folder (list view, alphabetically). Inside of those are the folders for the individual jobs, named with the job number first, and then something descriptive (ie: "4782 Annual Report"). Those folders are made from a template job folder which already contains the sub-folders needed for each job; "Original Files" (for untouched copies of the clients original files), "Final" (for the final RIP PDFs and the file(s) from which those PDFs were generated), "Working Files" (for any link files we change or create), and "Prepress" (which contains our Preps template and job files and our Prinergy VPS soft proofs). This way, if we know the customer and the job number, each job is easy to locate. Each month or so, after jobs are finished they are backed up onto an external hard drive (and a duplicate which is kept in a different location after this procedure) used for archiving. We do a lot of re-prints and this makes it really easy to find the previous job files as the archive drives are arranged the same way; Customer: Job number.
 
I've worked in a few print shops over the last 16 years each of which had a slightly different way of saving files. I'm a graphic designer and also do pre-press so I worked first hand with these systems.

First, as many have mentioned, stop saving on a desktop. Create a shared network folder that resides on a server that is properly backed up off-site, into the cloud, etc.

Organization formats:

Scenario #1
I worked in one shop that had a "Pending Art" folder with sub folders by customers names. This was for holding files of jobs that were not yet an official order. Usually still in estimating. Once they became an order, I as the graphics person would grab it out of there and put it in the "In Progress" folder and add the 6 digit job number to the front of the folder name. So it was like: #####_CustName_BusCard.

Once a week or so, the graphics manager (myself in this case) would go through and move the jobs we knew were completed into a network folder called "archive". Here, all of the jobs were stored by number in the format above.

Scenario 2
At another shop, they had one network folder with folders for each customer. Within the customers folder would be folders for each type of project (i.e.- Letterhead, Bus Cards, Envelopes, etc). Within each of those would be the native art files, along with a single folder for art/logos and another for fonts. One advantage I found to this was the ability to quickly find all of the customers files in one spot instead of spread across various folders by job number. The BIG problem, though, was since we had multiple designers, people would not always delete the old file, or overwrite it for fear of wanting to save the old for reference. And so we'd have files like "Johns Bus Cards_New", "Johns Bus Cards_Latest"....see the problem! How does one know which is the latest other than an unreliable modification date?! Another BIG problem was that one designer might make a folder for "Rancho Community College" while another designer might not see that one and make a folder called "RCC" or yet another "RC College"...so we'd end up with 2 or 3 folders for the same customer without realizing it.

My solution
After working in both of these scenarios, I made a combination of the 2:

I really liked having all of the customer's files in one location, so I kept the customer names as the parent folders. (No "Pending", "In Progress" and "Archived"). We just told the reps to send us the file once the estimate was approved. We made a rule that the folders had to be the customers full name, spelled out to avoid the duplicates. Within the customer's folders, we put the order number at the beginning of each job just like in scenario 1. This eliminated the need for "New" or "Latest"...we just knew the highest number was the newest and they automatically sorted themselves. Additionally, we got rid of the sub folders for things like bus cards, letterhead, etc and just saved all of the native art files by number and had 1 folder for "graphics/logos" and one for "fonts. This made it very clean and organized.
 
The no backups is scary. About 7 years ago I had our main machine die and had not backed up in 3 months. For years after we were still still dealing with the losses from that time.

With Apple computers it is super easy to backup, and the cost of an external hard drive is pretty cheap, especially considering what you are backing up. OS X has TimeMachine built in, once you connect an external hard drive it asks if you want to use it for backup. Select yes and it does its thing. Once the first backup is done, it goes every hour and does not effect performance at all.

A few years back I had a bad font that really messed up my system. I was able to restore my machine to one hour before I had installed that font. Was a life saver and was super simple.

For filing We have a "data" folder. In this folder we have folders for every letter, then companies are sorted alphabetically. I label files this way:
customer name/company name - job name - docket number

The docket number makes it very simple as every job as a unique number, so pulling it up is a breeze.
 

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