Nexus archiving

[paris_wendy]

What are people using to archive old jobs from Nexus? We have a Qualstar tape drive we'd like to incorporate with the system. Currently everything is being burned to DVD.

 

[Whitaker]

We bought an external drive that we connect to the Nexus PC and move old jobs to that as needed. Drives are cheap now and hold a lot of ripped data.

 

[urbain]

Hi paris_wendy and Whitaker,
at our company we never even considered to archive any jobs - old or new - from nexus. Our jobs are automatically deleted. But just as Whitaker says; an external harddrive should do the trick.

Just because i'm interested on this subject:
Can you give me some feedback why you do this at your company, which files exactly you are archiving and what purpace the archives later on have?

 

[paris_wendy]

urbain

Our other workflow is Prinergy. We archive working files and templates for everything. Most of our jobs rerun later, sometimes with minor changes to them. Prinergy has archiving software built into it that has a database for searching and retrieving old jobs. I was looking for something similar.

The Qualstar tape drive we are hooking up to Nexus was taken from the Prinergy workflow (it was replaced by a bigger drive).

We have now set up a computer to do a daily backup to the Qualstar. Our operator has to copy the files to the computer as they are ready to archive. I know an external drive will work, but we had this tape drive laying around.

 

[urbain]

paris_wendy,

if you are looking for an alternative for Prinergy that is compatible with nexus: there used to be software from artwork systems that kept track of all your files, but I can't recall it's name. Maybe there is someting from esko that can help you with that now.

Your backup solution sounds good allready, but maybe you should consider changing your workflows so that nexus does the job for your operator. If nexus can connect to that computer then you just need to add a few activities. First you need a select file that selects all of your files from the job folder and then a copy ftp to your destination (if I'm not mistaken).
I hope this works out, 'cause it'll save you and your colleages alot of work and error-free backups of the files.

 

[Whitaker]

Urbain:

We use our archived ripped data all the time. When a customer calls in a repeat job, we'll get the plates that have been stored away and see if there was a note stating that one of the plates needs to be replaced due to a crack or improper storage, and remake the plate(s) as needed. Even if we don't need to make a plate over we go ahead and send down the repeat job to our platesetter and not image the plates. We do this just in case a plate is needed last minute then there is little delay in getting the press back up and running ASAP. The beauty of having the ripped data is that you don't have to worry about all the usual prepress pitfalls like fonts missing etc. Hope this helps. Mike

BTW, we archive the links and the CT, LW data

 

[khasmir]

Like Urbain said, I would ad an extra copy activity to the workflow(s) that copies the screened 1bit tiff files to a place where they can be archived. Then an operator could put these on tape once a week or something. When you need new plates you just find the tiffs and send them back to the CTP or CDI or ...