About File Management - Part 3

In Part 1 I talked about file naming and versions, Part 2 continued with backup strategies and services, in this part I will talk a little bit about maintaining your equipment to reduce the chance of hard drive failure and some 'automated' tools for versioning.

The best defense is a good offense.  Being proactive about maintaining ones hard drives goes a long way to preventing actually having to use the backups that were so carefully produced.  There is one particular piece of software that really does a great deal to your hard drives to prevent hard drive failure.  SpinRite is a fantastic tool that, in surface refresh mode, uses really clever manipulation of the automatic gain control circuits in a spinning hard drive to point out to the drive where the weak spots are, thereby forcing the hard drive to swap out the weak sectors for new good ones. Steve Gibson, the creator of SpinRite, has written an under the hood document describing exactly what SpinRite does.  SpinRite is also a pretty amazing data recovery tool.  If your hard drive is in the process of, or has failed, there is a good chance that SpinRite can recover enough of the drive to allow you to copy the data to a fresh drive.  I have  been using it regularly in surface refresh mode for a few years and have yet to have a drive fail since I've been regularly running SpinRite on all of our computers.

I really like having versions of files available for reference and the occasional instance where I do something that was bad, and I need to revert back to a previous version. In Part 1 I talked about a naming convention that helps to handle this circumstance, but there are also a few server based applications that help do this same thing with far less effort when saving.

I have been experimenting with SVN or Subversion servers lately.  SVN servers handle versioning and revision of files and directory structures.  There are two parts to a functional SVN repository, the server and the client.  Both require software, or at least a knowledge of the specific server commands to accomplish the various functions the server can perform.  This sort of system can be very handy for automatically versioning files and directory structures.  it does, however take a bit more infrastructure than most have around.  SVN servers are also very efficient at managing versions of text files, like code or scripts, and can very efficiently create branches of code base and effectively merge different branches back into a central trunk.  This works very well for code projects, but can also be used, with lesser functionality with binary files and file formats other than text files.

If you are fortunate enough to have the facility to run servers, you could look into the Microsoft product SharePoint, which is a fantastically versatile web based application for document management, project management, version control and information sharing and dissemination.  Basic SharePoint licenses are included with Microsoft server operating systems, and soon will be available through Microsoft Office 365.  Similar to Google Apps service for business, but in many ways better, it is a whole package for collaboration, file management and versioning and communication.  Worth a look if you do a lot of projects. 

If you are looking for an open source web based alternative check out Alfresco.  Also offering collaborative web based document sharing environment.  If you can host it yourself. There are a couple of hosted solutions, but if you require hosting SharePoint might be the better choice.

Use the search below to find hosted SharePoint solutions.

It's no joke that these solutions take significant effort to implement, but the benefits can also be significant.  Use of a Time Machine for Mac or the built in backup solution for Windows can also be of use, but much less granular than some of the other solutions presented here.

Whatever your choice, a file management plan and a backup plan should be vital parts of  your show creations process.