Digital Art Storage

[barbazon]

We are a flexo label company and we have always stored all our customer art along with our prep files for easy accessibility for revisions etc. We are now at a point where we need to decide if we need to go to an offsite solution or if we should stop storing it at all. Not sure how we would handle revisions, base art, etc. What are other people doing?

 

[FlexoGrunt]

Hello,
We are currently handling job setup using ESKO Pilot (it in essence sets up the customers/part numbers and retains information in a database).

We archive by:
Letter/Cust/
/cust#.LINKS/ (this is the folder where links that are common to multiple copies)
/cust#.part#/
-cust#_part#.ai (this is the main comp file)
-cust#_part#-(a,b,c).pdf (PDF proof with revision letter)
-cust#_part#_F.ai (this is the "final" file that is sent to the rip)
/cust#.part#.LINKS/ (this folder contains all placed images that are specific to that job).

This is all kept live on a raid. (technology is so cheap it's the only way to go)

We have a DLT drive that backs us up daily along with one monthly backup of everything that is kept offsite. We do not keep past revisions (this was a tough decision and it's been extremely rare that we've needed to go back).


All in all the system has been great with everything easy to find.

 

[barbazon]

Digital Art Storage

Thanks a lot FlexoGrunt - helpful information. We are familiar with ESKO Pilot - we have Backstage light and ESKO Deskpack. How big is your company? Our prepress department is only four folk with two more artists - total company size of around 70. You mentioned offsite backup storage - is that kept indefinitely or just back a certain amount of time?

 

[Steve_S]

We archive current revisions only and archive by Date/Job #/Customer Name. We currently keep 48 months archive. We also keep a short-term back up of the Production PDF files that are created in Odystar, which files the imposed art and a PitStop report. The production files are purged after 3 months, and are mostly for peace of mind if a job has some sort of error/dispute. We back up on-site to a LaCie 2Big network drive, and we also back up off site - Incremental nightly, full on the weekend. Storage is cheap, paying someone to recreate the wheel is not.

 

[FlexoGrunt]

Thanks a lot FlexoGrunt - helpful information. We are familiar with ESKO Pilot - we have Backstage light and ESKO Deskpack. How big is your company? Our prepress department is only four folk with two more artists - total company size of around 70. You mentioned offsite backup storage - is that kept indefinitely or just back a certain amount of time?

- We have 3 people in our department (2 digiital and 1 RIP/Plating person). We are feeding 4 presses as well as countless job outs (pouches, bags, boxes, etc. etc..) as we are more of an end user packaging company than a prime label/film producer.

- Sounds like you are set up the same as we are with Backstage light and Deskpack (we are also using Plato and Kaleidoscope). So that should work.

- I asked about our offsite backups found out I was incorrect. We do a master backup once a year that is kept offsite. It includes everything on the server at that time (8 years worth?). We have older DVD archives but it's extremely rare that we have to access those.

 

[zipperhead]

Monthly, I backup all our new work on a DVD and use Disk Tracker ($30) to digitally archive the DVD. The jobs are kept by job#, and all the DVDs are kept near my desk by date so it takes me about 30 seconds to grab an old file as long as I know the old job#.
Our owner takes a 2nd copy of each DVD home for an off-site backup.
Time Machine is great tool for the daily backups

 

[M. R. Horton]

HDD Backups

HDD Backups

Our Database of approximately 500,000 printed products is backed up on tape each night for an offsite copy.
The individual Data Assets (graphics files) are stored via the database workflow on a CORAID network attached storage system and sync'ed daily with Lacie drives which are taken offsite on a rotating basis. If we had a catastrophic loss of the CORAID system, we could plug in the Lacie drives, point the database to them and continue with normal production, although throughput speed would be less than the CORAID, until we were able to replace/rebuild the CORAID system.