How Do You Save Files?

[Frank Defert]

Hi Everyone,

Doing a little " computer cleaning " and organizing of files and was wondering how do you save your laser files? Do you just save them to a designated folder on your hard drive, do you use a remote hard drive, do you save them to a disc, or do you use online storage?

Frank

[Joe Pelonio]

I have a directory on the hard drive for laser jobs only.

I have sub-directories for each of my high volume regular customers, then name them by either date or their PO# if they use them. For the rest I use their name followed by a number, for example smith1 smith2 etc.

Regularly I back them up onto DVDs. I should do them once a week but often forget.

[Bill Cunningham]

I basically do what Joe does.. I have a masterfolder called 'laserstuff' and I group everything I do with the laser under suitable sub.folder names.. I have folder that a basically dump everything into, just called 'Temp' and sort from that periodically in the the corrected folders whether it be clipart (also sub.catagorized) or jobs, or customer artwork etc..

[Frank Corker]

I'm almost identical with Joe, certainly on one folder for each regular customer, one for all finished jobs (even if they are duplicated in the individual folder. Regular backup on DVD. I never ever throw away the file I use for the engraving, but I do have a nasty habit of forgetting to put a note in the file to say what power/speed ratio I used. Naughty boy.

[Anthony Welch]

I also have been wondering what's best also. And thanks for the ideas. Frank, also thanks for the tip of adding speed and power to the file name. Who'd a thunk!

[Brian Robison]

And add the page size too. I also try to remember to add the cycle time for future estimating.
I have an external hard drive I save all my Corel files on as well as Auto Cad and Pictures from
several computers. Although it seemed to crash on me!!!

[Anna Linn]

I have my main folder then I've been saving each job into a folder according to the type of item and then titled by the client's name and something that will make it unique so it stands out to me, it was set up this way when I started. However, it might become a bit of mess so I may rethink this.

Also, I have started a spreadsheet with the vital stats plus any notes such as problems for each job so it's a quick way to look something up. It's not something I'd ever print so it works fine on the computer.

And I should add, we have an ad hoc network here so my files are backed up to another computer.

[Sandra Force]

Because I am on a network I save 2 ways. 1 to a laser only dedicated network drive and the other to an outside hard drive. That way if the network crashes I still have a complete copy of all files. When it comes to power and speed, I save that on my drives but I also color code all of my work so that I don't have much changing to do. Black is .5 speed and full power, cyan is 2.0 speed and 40% power. These are Kern lasers and don't cross over on figuring speed and power to the ULS and Epilog. Boy was that a learning curve.:eek:

[Kenneth Hertzog]

I save like Joe to the hard drive and
backup to my files on a memory stick (1G)
no programing just files
I can always reload the program
ken

[Mike Null]

Mine's pretty similar.

Corelart/alphabetic/customer/year

Backed up on seperate hard drive and thumb drive.

I save settings by material rather than job, though certain jobs have their own settings. That's done in my driver.

[Todd Schwartz]

Similar - large volume customers get their own folder, one offs get immediately moved to an archive folder, the rest are in one folder. Named as followed; company name or abbreviation_project name_date. i.e. MDS_boxtemplates_020508. Keep notes within the file on materials, settings, etc.. Save to internal hard drive, when I think of it drag my laser folder over to an external drive but back up everything on my internal hard drive each nigh with Mozy.

Todd

[Chad Voller]

I use a little more complex file structure, but once you get used to it, it's second nature.

If you can, get a separate hard drive to keep personal, and work files separate if they are on the same computer. It makes it easier to search and do backups. That reminds me, I need to backup at home again.....losing work to a seized hard drive sucks.

At work we have a fairly complex, but organized system. We have a main working folder that contains all jobs sorted by client name, and then sorted within those by the job name (a quick description of the job) with a date code also in the folder name. This makes it easy to find first, who the job was done for, then next, the description and date of the job. All of our work is mostly done for repeating clients, so this works for us.

Inside of named job folder, are the individual folders that separate what was used to do the job. For instance, we have 3D, Print, Project Info, Image Manipulation, Laser, etc... folders. And inside of each of those categories, we have folders for the software packages that fit into those categories, and folders for the placement of items that those packages use. Like in 3D we have 3DS Max, Rhino, Renders, Maps. 3D animation, illustration, and print is our main business, so we use a lot of software to get one job done and can end up with easily a couple hundred to thousands of files per job if doing a large project. We had to implement this file folder structure to keep everything straight, so that all employees could find what they were looking for, and for revisiting old projects, you know exactly where to look.

We have a blank folder template setup to easily add the folder structure when new jobs are added where you only have to rename the first folder with the job and date code. But for just a laser business, this might be to much. But this structure could easily be simplified to suite this.