External Hard Drive & Multiple Users

[RyannReed]

Howdy Folks. First time posting here. While I am not a Chief user, I am taking over the IT For a remodeling company that has 1 current designer, and will be onboarding 1-2 more in the coming months. I had a couple questions regarding using External Drives as a working drive and also best practices for sharing files/resources. 

 

Currently we do not have any Local network storage (Everything is Google Drive) and Our designer is concerned about keeping all of the plans on her MacBook Pro. I was wondering if using an external drive as a "working" drive is a good practice or not? If not, what do most people do when it comes to this? 

 

Also, with multiple users potentially looking to access the files, is there a best practice for managing this process? Is it ok to access files simultaneously? If not, what is recommended for making it easy to share, collaborate, etc. 

 

Thanks in advance

 

Cheers!

-Brian

[TeaTime]

They have a KB article on this: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-03155/sharing-projects-in-a-work-environment-that-is-utilizing-cloud-network-services.html
Their recommendation is not to work off cloud, only use it as a backup. One would assume that there may be issues if the file is stored and accessed from the cloud. I've not had much experience setting up cloud programs, does google drive have a setting to save the file locally and not store it on the cloud?

 

55 minutes ago, RyannReed said:

Is it ok to access files simultaneously? If not, what is recommended for making it easy to share, collaborate, etc. 

It's not that it's not ok, you just can't. The files are locked and only editable by one person at a time. There is no true file collaboration, only sharing.

 

[RyannReed]

Thanks, @TeaTime. The file sharing/lock aspect makes sense. 

 

As for Google Drive, you can have synced local files/folders on your computer. So for example, you could have google drive backup your desktop or your documents folder. Any time you save new files there, they will be transferred to the cloud (And vise versa). This is good for a backup copy and redundancy. 

 

Since she is using her personal computer, she wants to ensure that her work files stay backed up. I think having an external drive is also a good choice. Just curious if that can be used for a working drive - to open, edit and save to and from the external drive in real time. 

 

 

 

[rlackore]

Our office uses Microsoft's Azure cloud for all our file storage; OneDrive syncs everything. This works fine, but requires coordination to ensure a cloud file isn't being worked on locally by multiple designers, because Chief's file locking only works locally, not on a cloud file. When a project requires intra-office collaboration, we set up a Sharepoint site and use Teams to manage file access, history, and to check-in/check-out cloud shares. I don't know if Google Drive (or Dropbox) business accounts offer similar functionality. Until Chief supports multiple simultaneous users (probably never), you have to use a kludge.

[RyannReed]

@rlackoreThanks, this is helpful as well. I think I want to do something similar to what you have set up with Azure/OneDrive (just using Google Drive). I have a feeling with a small design team, we can easily work out the process of "Don't open files from the network" until we have some sort of version control or check-in/checkout process. 

 

Thanks again!

[Renerabbitt]

2 hours ago, RyannReed said:

@rlackoreThanks, this is helpful as well. I think I want to do something similar to what you have set up with Azure/OneDrive (just using Google Drive). I have a feeling with a small design team, we can easily work out the process of "Don't open files from the network" until we have some sort of version control or check-in/checkout process. 

 

Thanks again!

have had terrible working experiences using google drive for sync caching issues and file redundancy when the sync is delayed.
Onedrive has these issues as well but not nearly as bad. But onedrive is incredibly slow
Dropbox is the gold standard.
or use a NAS