Due to the current condition of things….we have decided our office is going virtual and we are sending many people to work out of their homes:-/

We will have our document production team running all Mac computers (3 total) with Adobe In-Design and Adobe Illustrator but sharing a common server from Rackspace.com. We were going to access the Rackspace server as a common drive to create/edit documents live/cached on each Mac desktop and resave them each time but it takes waaaaay too long to load and save so it isn’t going to work.

I think the solution to our problem is having our entire document database on each separate computer (all docs contain linked images/graphics/etc) and syncing them periodically throughout the day to the Rackspace.com server which will serve as the “master”. Is this the best idea?

Any ideas how I can link up 3 Mac computers to a Linux server and sync folders periodically? Is there some software that does this easily?

Thanks for your help!

Chris

 

There are many ways to do it. The best way to retain data integrity would be to use a CVS system of some sort, and have people check in their changes to given files. Only issue is, there is a fairly steep learning curve if someone is uninitiated with the ways of unix.

Other options would include a distributed AFS file system, which is more transparent to users, and reasonably good at preventing simultaneous writes.

Or, you could set up a farm of workstation machines talking to a common file system, and just have everyone RDC/Remote Desktop into them to do their work.

There's no magic bullet unfortunately. You're either going to need everyone to have a reasonable amount of bandwidth available, or be willing to learn how CVS/cvsup works.

If you want a kludge, just set up an iDisk, give everyone write access, and hope for the best.

 

Thanks bud...I'll look into those.

We aren't to worried about simultaneous writes because everyone is always working on something different. Version control isn't really an issue...we nailed that down a long time ago and have tight controls around it. The only thing we are worried about is all file links being updated if a master graphic were to change that would affect previous created docs....