work over net or not?

which is better drag a project off the network to work on then put it
away or design over the network risking outages and data loss? our new
network is 1000m, we just upgraded. i never work over the network but a
guy here insist yet he cant explain why it's better tia

 

bob z. has always looked at it this way -
if you copy the project off of the network server and put it on your
box, you are basically making an automatic backup. if you keep the
project on the network, you are without a backup. bob z. is sure
someone could shoot some holes in this idea, but it seems like it is
fairly foolproof.

bob z.
ps does the guy you work with dip skoal bandits?

 

you know it AND him Z

 

If you copy a project, or any part/assembly/drawing from the network,
how do you know someone else hasn't done the same thing? Then when you
copy it back, who is going to overwrite who's latest revisions? If your
group is extremely disciplined, then you can get around these inherent
network issues. If your group is spread out and doesn't communicate
every day, you will eventually end up having several copies of the same
files all over the network and no one knows who has the latest
revision.

Just ask yourself one question: How much will it cost if the wrong
revision makes it out to the shop floor? $5,000, $10,000, more. These
dollar figures are way more than getting a PDM system in to simply
manage your SolidWorks data.

These are PDM 101 issues that PDMWorks can address. So if you have the
software (included in SolidWorks Office Pro), I would highly, highly
recommend you look at using it. I've seen it fix these issues many
times with little effort needed from the engineering and especially IT
groups.

Steve O

 

we are a group of 3 and we work on our own projects. rarely do we
concurrent engineer. there is no real fear of overwriting data. my
issue with this practice is performance and data loss. thanks!

 

Do you have parts/sub-assys that are shared between more than one job, and
are the files spread across multiple folders?

If the answer to both is "no", then you may get away with copying all the
files locally.

If it is "yes" to either, than managing the process of copying the files
back to the server will be an error-prone nightmare. This is where a pdm
system would automate the process.

Also, a word of warning regarding BobZ's view that copying the files locally
is more secure because "you're making a backup". It's only a backup if you
don't alter any files. If you spend 2 weeks working on the project and your
hard drive goes pop, then you'll have lost your data (unless you also backup
your c: drive every night).

John H

 

Other than the concurrent working thing you need to have a stable and
fast network as I believe SWX continually reads and writes to and from
the network.

We have a small network in our office and it works OK - but then there
are only 2 of us accessing it and not always at the same time.

I have tried it at home over my wireless network coupled to a Netgear
SC101 network storage drive and it is a nightmare - it falls down on a
regular basis once or twice a day - its much more efficient to work
from a local copy or a copy on a flash drive.


Kev