It's 10 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Files Are? Keeping Backup Copies of Your Files Is a Good Idea, But Finding Them Again Is Tricky.
Bob Schaffel and Chuck Weger
BACK IN THE DAYS when page layouts and art were stored on film (you can remember if you shut your eyes tightly), it was relatively easy to file and locate things. Films for Job No. 1234 were on this shelf, those for
Job No. 6789 were on that shelf, and so on. With the advent of all-digital production, that filing system went out the window.
These days, a simple four-page brochure may require dozens of files, among them page layouts, EPS line art, TIFF scanned images, screen and printer fonts, and word-processing documents. Lose any one of those files, and you have a Big Task ahead of you, re-creating the job.
So what do you do? Make copies of everything by backing up your hard disk. But backing up files without having a tracking system for finding where you put them is frustrating and difficult, like putting your lucky penny into a fishbowl with thousands of other pennies.
In a production environment, files are stored at several levels: online, near-line, and off-line. Online files are those currently on your hard disks or your file servers' disks. If you're neat and organized, online files are pretty easy to track.
Near-line files are those you've removed from an active hard disk but that need to be readily available because you'll use them again soon. You might store these on SyQuest or Bernoulli cartridges, optical discs, or removable-shuttle drives.
Finally, off-line files are those you don't need to access frequently; you store these on slower, less convenient (and less costly) devices, such as tape or recordable-CD-ROM drives. Files stored off-line are often compressed or encoded to save space.
Subcategories of online, near-line, and off-line files are backup or archive copies. Backup files are copies stored on separate media, basically for disaster insurance. Archive files are copies you keep either for posterity (making permanent records of your documents) or for pickups (reusing graphics or copy in future documents).
Another wrinkle is version control -- that is, tracking files that have updated content but the same names and possibly various locations on the disk or network. Watch out for duplication: having the same files/folders on your hard disk and on others' disks or on your server. Duplicates waste space; worse, they can lead to mistakes (I edit my copy, and you edit your copy -- which is the correct version?).
How do we keep track of all this? Right now, there isn't a good, unified solution. Find File (in System 7.5) and Find Pro (its shareware equivalent) keep track only of online volumes. Utilities such as File Genie Pro, from Duet Development (408-559-3838), and Virtual Disk, from Continuum Software (503-848-7112), each catalog the contents of removable media when you eject a disc or a cartridge, but they don't yet help with server situations. Alessandro Levi Montalcini's shareware utility List Files, available on most online services, lists the contents of any disk volume or folder; to search the list, import it into a database such as Claris' FileMaker Pro.
Getting more sophisticated, you can use full-fledged image-cataloging applications, such as Adobe Fetch and Canto Cumulus. The powerhouse in this category is Cumulus; it can quickly and automatically catalog a whole volume full of files of many types. But Cumulus and all other programs of its type lack the ability to decode what's inside archive files, such as those created by Dantz's popular Retrospect utility.
At the very high end, several companies are building sophisticated image catalogs, using Oracle or Sybase databases on UNIX servers. These are usually too rich for the average Mac shop, however.
The big problem in all this is movement: How do you tell your cataloging tool that you've moved a file or folder unless you use that tool itself to perform the move? Cumulus lets you manually update the database, but we'd like an automatic updater. We need the Ultimate Finder, one that manages files from the outside (by external attributes such as name, modification date, and so on) and the inside (by examining file contents), saving lists of online, near-line, and off-line volumes.
The whole file-management problem promises to get worse, not better, as documents composed of many subparts proliferate. Advice for now? Stay organized, make a tracking system by using a simple database -- or even paper and pencil -- and stick to it religiously. Eternal vigilance is the price of digitocracy.
Bob Schaffel is emerging-technologies consultant for R. R. Donnelley & Sons. Chuck Weger is a consultant and publisher of the Photoshop Monitor newsletter.
