best way to share chief plans with staff

[Grayson1]

whats the best way to share chief files with our co-workers?

we have been using 128g thumbdrives and it works but do any of you guys have luck with drop box or other cloud based system?

thanks !!!!

        Justin Johnson

        TLC  Design/Build LLC

[DRAWZILLA]

Dropbox works for a lot here

[tommy1]

Dropbox works fine as long as only one person is working the a specific plan at a time. If two people are in the same plan at the same time, one plan will show as "conflicted".

[cv2702]

Many of you are avid users of DropBox.  Me too.  There are issues with any cloud sharing service (DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive...).

 

If you're using a cloud service so others can 'view' plans or whatever, then no problem.

 

If you give 'write' access to your users, as in a collaborative arrangement, then beware.  With DropBox for example, all your users will have a local copy of the plans and any local change will get the cloud copy synchronized.  Great, that's the objective (except for the conflicting situations if there is too much concurrent work).  But it also means that any of your users inadvertently deleting their local copy will trigger the deletion of the copy in the cloud which in turn will delete all local copies.  You should have regular backups of your cloud content.  DropBox does give you the option to recover deleted files, but in an active environment, this can be a nightmare: I know for having lived it.

 

In my opinion, it's not a good idea to give 'write' access to your 'common' cloud service.  One approach is to give users 'read' access to the common pool of plans in the cloud.  Each user will get a local copy of the plans, be able to modify only his/her local copy.  Once that user is done, he/she copies the work onto a separate cloud depot, where only an administrator and that user have 'write' access; that does imply one such depot for each user in the group.  Once certified by the administrator, the plan is then moved to the common pool of plans in the cloud.

 

This post would not have been created if DropBox allowed the exclusion of deletes when providing 'write' access.

[chief58]

I use dropbox all the time with no problems so far and backup to carbonite

[lbuttery]

I recommend a naming system so you know who last worked on a plan

 

my  partner and I used this system

 

123_OAK_MODEL_180113_1535_LB_X9,plan

 

MODEL or REMOD or ALT01 etc etc etc

 

LAYPS or LAYCP LAY01 etc etc etc

where  PS = permit set, where CP = client presentation

 

LB = my initials or my partners initials JK

 

each time do a "save as" with this naming for the backup

then do a second "save as" to keep plan and layout in sync

using 123_MAIN_X9.plan or .layout

 

very quick to do a double "save as"

 

Lew

[tommy1]

To elaborate more on my earlier post, I was using drop box for years with Katy Fernandez and Louis. Personally I don't like it and think it's dangerous if you keep all your files there only like Katy did. Yes, I can think of a couple of times where drop box screwed up land lost many plan folders. Yes they were able to get most of them back but many were not the latest plan. Most of the time when Katy would share a folder with me to start the construction plan phase, I would copy that plan out of drop box to do my construction plans and then put it back in that folder when I'm done. I ALWAYS had all plans the I worked on backed up outside of drop box. Katy said that she too had backups but whenever drop box lost folders, Katy always had to come back to me to retrieve the plans. Thank G-- I had my own back ups. So as I mentioned, if your sharing job folders or plans with other people, BE SURE that only one person is working on the plan at one time. ALWAYS SAVE FILES AND FOLDERS OUTSIDE OF DROP BOX. I know many of you haven't needed to do this but I can tell you first hand that sh-- happens. I must say though that most of the time, we didn't have any problems because we always asked each if the other person was in the plan. Just a word of caution.

[lbuttery]

ALWAYS SAVE FILES AND FOLDERS OUTSIDE OF DROP BOX

 

Tommy:

 

I agree, save to your own folders first

 

then at the end of a session save to Dropbox

 

Lew

[RobUSMC]

I assume with the new X-10 where is is more integrated this will solve this correct???

[DRAWZILLA]

In X10 you can tell Chief where to look for libs.(data folder) wherever they might reside. Some people put the whole Data folder on another drive or Cloud service.