Archive question

[Farabomb]

It's archive time so I'm trying to go through and clean up some things that will never be needed again. I've noticed on my 3TB drive almost all the really old files I have, most fonts are toast. That doesn't matter much as the jobs are 5+ years old (and quark).

My question is about going forward. If I zip all the folders that contain fonts and native files with that prevent the fonts from getting toasted? The 3TB is on a PC so I know that's where the fonts got broken.

The people running prinergy/EVO, what do you archive? I've been keeping the for print files, the refined files and the preps .job files. I trash the JDFMarksFlats folder and .vps files. Since reprints get new numbers I just rename, relink to the refined files and create a new .jdf file. The one issue I do see is I don't know exactly what the old sheet looked like. Most of the time that's not a problem as we save presssheets. I'm wondering if saving the old .vps files might be worth the space so I can know exactly how it was laid out the last time. It's extremely rare that I do an exact reprint so it's rarely an issue.

[Joe]

We have RBA delete the .vps files and then archive the whole job. If we need to see the VPS later we can always re-run them.

[Farabomb]

That's my theory but I wonder if it's exactly as it was run. I avoid any rotation in perps, I make sure the PDF is correct as it's dump the PDF into the runlist, pick the template and go. I have the Preps config file to center everything by default. Since there was a short time I wasn't here I've often had reprints where the template was missing, files were missing and other weird shit. I've going through some old folders now and I'm just scratching my head trying to figure out what this guy did. It's a wonder any jobs got out.

Still wondering about the .zip file question. It make sense to zip the natives to retain working fonts but not sure it will work in practice. May have to find an old zip file with natives on the drive and see if that restores in a workable condition.

[Joe]

ZIP files should leave the file structure of the enclosed files intact but there are a lot of what-ifs involved. Like older versions of AFP in the Mac OS and older versions of File Services for Macintosh on Windows servers. It could be a crapshoot.

[Joe]

That's my theory but I wonder if it's exactly as it was run. I avoid any rotation in perps, I make sure the PDF is correct as it's dump the PDF into the runlist, pick the template and go. I have the Preps config file to center everything by default. Since there was a short time I wasn't here I've often had reprints where the template was missing, files were missing and other weird shit. I've going through some old folders now and I'm just scratching my head trying to figure out what this guy did. It's a wonder any jobs got out.

Still wondering about the .zip file question. It make sense to zip the natives to retain working fonts but not sure it will work in practice. May have to find an old zip file with natives on the drive and see if that restores in a workable condition.

That is what happens if someone decides to rename a template file. Or deletes it when they are done with that job. It's worthy of execution to the offender.

[Farabomb]

Totally agreed about the template thing. I told the guy to never, ever rename or modify a template. Always copy and rename if you're going to adjust something. Luckily I have multiple backups of my templates folders.

I took an old file from the drive and it unzipped fine with all the fonts it seemed. I didn't check it mainly because I didn't want to open quark. The really old files are toast. Most of the quark files lost their extensions. They come up as unix executables and renaming with the extension allows it to be opened.

If it contains natives, I'm going to zip it.

I would connect the 3TB drive directly to the Mac but even though it says Mac compatible on the box, it's really not. I fought with it for weeks, tried different drives (between personal and work drives we have 5 of them) and it just didn't play nice with the Mac. On the PC side running NTFS, not a single issue.

[Joe]

We exclusively use SMB on all of our Macs and PCs and that has helped with the file issues on restoring from backup. As long as AFP is not introduced anywhere during the life of a file we don't have any issues with copying, backing up, and restoring.

I have a Phantom external drive purchased from OWC that does the same thing. Flawless on Windows but nothing but problems on a Mac. Even reformatting as a Mac disk doesn't help on the Mac. When I plug it in it usually doesn't even mount and if it does I can take it to the bank that it will dismount itself in short order.

[Farabomb]

Yup, same issue I had here. Strange errors and then it would dismount. Nothing but problems so I just made it NTFS and backup through the server.