Backups made easy!

At work, we deal with numerous individual projects. These projects might be 30 second commercials, or individual websites. We have several people working on these projects, and multiple projects may be worked on per day. Because of the size of the files we use (mostly video), all our work has to be done locally. Any of you who work in IT, know where this is going. If you've ever had your home computer crash, and lost all your pictures, you know, too.

It's imperative we backup our files regularly, and this means it needs to be a simple operation. Figure in cost, and your back to needing a centralized backup solution. This is where our massive file servers and tape auto-loaders enter the picture.

So now we have tons of huge files sitting on multiple individual computers and terabytes of online storage available via the network. How do you get the files on the server? This is the problem I've been working on for a while now. There was a system in place when I got here, written by an employee who is no longer around. The system is genius in it's simplicity, but vastly over complicated. And it has no flexibility. It works with the old network. (This is something else I've been working on; migrating from an NT network, to 2003 Active Directory.)

I've dissected the code, and figured out how it works. It's built on good old CMD files, and a few registry hacks. My latest and greatest version is just about ready to be rolled out. Once it's in production, I'll post more details. here's how it works:

1) Projects are stored in directories named for the project. Something like M12345.

2) To backup the project to the server, the user will right click the directory, and choose "Project Backup". This executes a CMD file built around Robocopy. That's all there is to it.

3) When a project is completed, and no longer needed locally, the user right clicks and selects "Project Move". This performs a final backup, and checks for errors. If no errors are discovered, local files are deleted. if errors are detected, the user is prompted to retry the operation.

4) If a job that was previously moved comes back for whatever reason, and needs to be modified, there's an operation for that, too. The user right clicks the project on the server, and selects "Project Restore". THis copies all relevant files back down to the local machine.

Very simple for the user, but does a lot behind the scenes!