Small firm file server 3

[glass99]

Has anyone tried using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) for a small engineering office with some remote freelancers logging in?

We have been using Dropbox, which works very well in most respects. It has zero maintenance and setup, it allows access to anyone with an internet connection, and its backed up. The thing that DB does badly is it doesn't lock out other users when someone is working on a file.

I am thinking to have all our files on an NAS which is then backed up with Dropbox.

Does anyone have experience with this?

 

[zdas04]

FreddyNurk,
I thought about it, but the drive is SATA 3.0 (not USB 3) and needs an active computer. I started another step last night and the process crashed an hour after I went to bed. Now I'm having to copy 4th level folders.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[greenone]

We are a 5-person office and have been using a Netgear NAS for about 6 years. No adverse issues with small CAD files being worked on directly on the NAS.

Also have a router set up so that people not in the office can VPN in and work as if they are here. Works better than the built-in ReadyNAS remote option.

Works pretty well for us. Have had the drives go bad, so I always have a spare ready to hotswap.

We do a local backup to an external hard drive, and also cloud backup.

 

[glass99]

greenone: Great to hear that the NAS+VPN combo works in the real world. I think I might dive in and get one.

Can anyone recommend specific models of NAS's? Which Netgear/Synology/WD should I get? Assuming max 5 people using it, no more than 2TB required.

 

[EngineeringEric]

I have heard that you should always size your NAS for a minimum of 3x total system size.
*** 950 GB server X 3 = 2.850 TB... But a 3TB only allows 2.7 TB of usable space, therefore bump up one size.
-Not a rule only guidance and sometimes the cost is small for increasing in size now vs later.

 

[beej67]

glass99 -

I hear you. Good luck with the NAS thing, and report back once you've got it set up. I may switch to something like that eventually.

On the AutoCAD path issue - I always keep all references in the same folder, and I don't reference a path when I drop in the reference. That usually keeps things loading properly.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[MikeHalloran]

<tangent>
Re AutoCAD paths

One of my former employers made much use of standard blocks, all kept in a few directories on the sole file server.

... which worked okay for everyone else, except lucky me, who got assigned the fastest computer in the place as my workstation. ... yep, the file server.

I could not find a way to stop AutoCAD, or MSDOS, I never knew which one, from helping me by substituting C:\blockpath whenever I put in \\\fileserver\blockpath when it happened that I was working at the fileserver. So every time I edited a file containing blocks at my computer, I had to then go to someone else's computer and fix the damn block references.

... else the boss got all pissy about not being able to find the blocks. That would be the same boss who wouldn't 'waste' the money on a dedicated fileserver stuffed in a closet.

</tangent>

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[glass99]

Mike: yes, the time and frustration cost of futzing with things like filepaths on an ongoing basis is significant. Unless of course you are billing by the hour, in which case its amazing.

 

[TomDOT]

zdas, have you considered using ZFS or other bitrot resistant file systems?

 

[beej67]

Referencing blocks in a central location is a holdover from the days back when I wasn't using terrabyte external drives as doorstops.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[glass99]

beej67: Curious how you organize your CAD files on your server. Do you have references for blocks, titleblocks and architectural backgrounds all in the same folder as your current CAD files? Do you copy the whole thing to an "Issue" folder every time you issue a revision to the drawings?

We don't have large numbers of sheets in our drawings, and try to put all the sheets in one dwg with minimal XRefs.

 

[zdas04]

TomDOT,
I'm not familiar with ZFS or the term "bitrot". After 34 years of computers being a major part of my practice, I am pretty familiar with the sins of our past causing problems with our futures (that is my main problem right now, improperly formed meta data on photographs that end up corrupting files). I will look into ZFS and see if I can incorporate it or similar technology.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[TomDOT]

zdas, Wikipedia is telling me I should call it "Data Degradation" - but "bit rot" is the term I hear used.

Basically, a single random bit flip will often corrupt an entire file (photo, whatever) in a conventional file system. While it's not likely to be totally unreadable, there will often be significant negative impact. With a "next gen file system" (ZFS or btrfs) the bit flip is automatically detected and corrected.

Ars Technica has some good articles, including example photos with a single bit flipped in both conventional :

http://arstechnica.com/information-...-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/

http://arstechnica.com/information-...h-using-the-zfs-next-gen-filesystem-on-linux/

 

[brandonbw]

Freenas uses ZFS. I was able to build a test server for about $850. That was with five 3TB Western Digital Red drives and 12GB of ECC ram (ECC is a must with ZFS).

I did write a small followup to my experience with our Synology NAS, which works very well.

http://bwengr.com/blog/google-drive-cloud/

100GB of Google Drive is now $1.99/month.

Relative xrefs are your friend.
project/xrefs
project/sheets
Previous revisions just get the bundle of sheets e-transmitted to an Archive folder.

B+W Engineering and Design
Los Angeles Civil Engineer and Structural Engineer

http://bwengr.com

 

[beej67]

beej67: Curious how you organize your CAD files on your server. Do you have references for blocks, titleblocks and architectural backgrounds all in the same folder as your current CAD files? Do you copy the whole thing to an "Issue" folder every time you issue a revision to the drawings?

We don't have large numbers of sheets in our drawings, and try to put all the sheets in one dwg with minimal XRefs.

I copy everything I need to reference into the same project folder. Blocks, tifs, images, title blocks, USGS quad rasters, whatever. I do not save CAD files from previous issues, because those always get mucked up anyway by changes to the references. Instead, I keep PDFs of each issue, which are dated and then secured against modification with a password. In fact, I don't print from AutoCAD at all, I send the PDFs themselves to the print shop. Mostly I find that clients just want the PDFs, so I only ever print if I'm submitting for permit or issuing CDs.

Most of the old methods regarding referencing blocks and the like in a central location were holdovers from back when storage space mattered. It no longer matters, period. Most of the old methods regarding keeping revision history in DWG format were likewise holdovers from back when PDFs weren't a thing, and everyone had to plot out of AutoCAD. I just dumped the holdover policies and moved on with my life. Revision history in DWG was a nightmare, especially if you have your blocks in a central location, because suddenly new changes to your blocks show up in old already-issued drawings. And if you are pulling an old revision for some reason, chances are that reason is some kind of disagreement about what you sent out, so you definitely need to know exactly what you sent out.

I come from a background where we would have three or four XREFs blended so we could have multiple designers working on the same project at the same time. One doing utilities, one doing profiles, one doing grading, etc, in separate DWGs that reference each other. As I'm a smaller shop now, I much prefer to have everything in one file. I'm iffy on survey - sometimes I keep it in an XREF, and sometimes I just drop it in as a block. It's nice to be able to move survey text around, but you run the risk of accidentally deleting something important, so I usually lock the layers.

my .02

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[zdas04]

beej67,
Thanks for that, You covered a bunch of topics I've been struggling with. I like your solution.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[glass99]

beej67: This is great information. We have been eliminating xrefs to the maximum degree possible too, including putting title blocks directly into the drawing. I have always thought of xrefs as being over complicated and fiddly. We do keep the CAD file with the old revision though because from time to time we have to go back. Its kind of like a big undo button. We accidentally deleted a bunch of work one time, and were able to reconstruct from the previous issue.

 

[zdas04]

That's what backups are for. Version tracking in AutoCad is simply a nightmare.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[glass99]

zdas: speaking of which, how do you back up? An online service?

 

[FreddyNurk]

There are commercial packages around for revision tracking and so on for AutoCAD (Vault is but one), all of them have their benefits and drawbacks as well.

A lot of the issue with XREF stuff is whether or not the data contained in the XREF is likely to change. A manual process to import and bind all the XREF data, and then remove it again when the client issues an update (building services for example, hopefully survey stays static...) as opposed to just linking the new file in when the client changes something, is often labour intensive.

I've largely been for the use of XREF, though it hasn't suited all my applications and others have ended up binding in the data and then having to scrap the revision. There are also options for exporting all relevant drawings including XREFs and static blocks in a package so that they're kept clean and unencumbered by such issues as what beej mentions, but that leads to where to store them (i.e. version them). Later versions do funky things like sheet sets with automatically generated drawing lists and title block properties, but not many places use them.

Conceptually there are heaps of good tools that do the equivalent for software development, and it does get frustrating to have to wrangle through AutoCAD's methods instead of having a system similar to code and libraries, but it sounds like most of us are in similar situations.

 

[zdas04]

I use an online service, it runs an incremental back up every night and keeps 30 days of incremental backups. If you fail to notice a bust in a month then it is lost. I've had to recreate files 2-3 times in the years I've been with them and the process worked well.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat