Archive database

[Yooper prepress]

Any suggestions for a cheap archive database solution?
Currently we use Cat Finder but that is no longer supporting Mac os. Anything similar out there?
Thanks




Thank you all for the suggestions! Disk Tracker seems to be a reasonable solution. Very similar to Cat Tracker.
The hard drive suggestions are very interesting but the problem is we already have over 600 dvd/cd's. Two copies of each kept at different locations.

 

[pacart]

We used to use a program called cd finder. But now what we have done is moved our entire archive to daisy chained harddrives connected to a mac and we let spotlight do the indexing on it, this has worked out to be a lot faster and user friendly.

 

[david.young]

We use a program called Disk Tracker, inexpensive and works well.

 

[Sev]

We use a program called Disk Tracker, inexpensive and works well.

We also use Disk Tracker. Works great, and is very fast.

-Sev

 

[Lammy]

third vote for disk tracker. Always worked great and was simple.

 

[Colorblind]

We use DiskCatalogMaker. It is (was?) bundled within Roxio Toast as DiskCatalogMakerRE but you can also buy it as a stand-alone. Very simple interface and works good for our needs. FUJIWARASOFTWARE - DiskCatalogMaker for Mac

 

[Chris Halt]

Retrospect to TB hard drives. We are a high volume shop working with large files. Drives became cheaper than burning to disc. Unfortunately, no one was certifying burn to high density Blu-ray or we may have gone that route. I think the Spotlight solution is interesting.

 

[pacart]

I have been using spotlight now for 2 years, we are a small shop, but we have 20 years worth of jobs saved onto one 3TB drive connected via FW800 to a Mac Pro. All we do is type the reference number into the spotlight window and the job is easily found. We still burn to DVD for disaster recovery. Our database on the 3TB drive is organized into disk #s that correspond with the actual DVD.

 

[dabob]

CD finder here . . .

 

[onwsk8r]

Hard drives with RAID here. No fancy software. I used to do sysadminning for a large public university so I learned some nifty tricks - most notably I found that I can use old (read: cheap) hardware with decently nice drives and a well-tuned setup to meet our throughput needs. We've found that eliminating the in-house backup/archive (with the cost of hardware in 2012) creates an overall win in reduced overhead for reprints and saved time and lack of confusion. Plus, Amazon's cloud has a cheap archival solution, so everything is backed up offsite.

We prefix the file with the job number, so if job 13145 is a reprint of 12189, the job ticket for 13145 will say reprint of 12189 and all I need to do is find the file that starts with 12189. Sort the files in the folder by name and this is trivial.

I guess we're not really archiving per se: we just add drives as necessary (and replace as necessary). Our costs are quite insignificant and our persistent cloud backup means that even if the building burns down, we lose at most one day of work.

We might be a unique case here, though, because we have many tenured customers and many of them have been using the same, say, logo for a decade or two. The trick to making it all work is organization: we use folders to organize what InDesign calls links - ie a logos folder. We do work for a real estate company that puts photos of realtors on business cards and fliers, and they send out cards with photos of individuals or individual photos of the whole staff. So we have a "Photos" folder for them.

Part of making this work is getting artwork to do things on production's terms: don't save a photoshop file, save a tiff. Don't save a .ai file, save a PDF (doesn't work as well for InDesign, but it's pretty rare for us to reprint an InDesign with no changes . Then since we are Fiery driven, we can just take those files, put them in the Fiery, and use Impose to handle the rest.