More on file systems, this time a personal view from when I worked on a LAN
When I worked on a LAN my team used file systems extensively and we had a very effective working practice, as follows:
- We all had laptops
- We all stored our master data on our laptops
- We all stored our published files on a collaboration server
- The work in progress (WIP) area on our laptops was synchronised to a shared WIP area on the server
- Most of us used a scheduled robocopy script to keep our server side WIP areas up to date
- If someone was out of the office, off sick, in a meeting etc, we could always find their current documents in their WIP
- Every hour we were shouting across the office “its in my WIP”
This system was great because:
- All of our data was local
- We never ran out of quota
- Performance was great
- Everything was shared, up to the minute stuff in WIP areas, published stuff on a web collaboration server
- All important stuff was backed up
However it still suffered from the problems I described here.
