We currently have unexplained intermittent issues with our Mac OS X clients and permissions on AI, PSD or PDF files that are stored on a Win2K8R2 server using SMB. All Mac's are joined to AD via Centrify's client, and what seems to be a problem every so often is the user will get a message that the file is locked, or they cannot save it to the network share. All users are in the same AD group, and that group has WRITE permission on the share.
Being that Adobe doesn't officially support their products being saved to Network shares, what do other shops do to work-around this strange limitation. All sorts of people have posted to various sites about the same issues we encounter, and we can go weeks, if not months with everything working fine, and then we'll have issues for a while.
Here's Adobe's official stance on saving Illustrator AI files to Network Shares:
Illustrator support for networks and removable media
I have some upset users, as this always seems to be an issue when we have a "hot rush" job, and this slows things down considerably.
My only thinking is to work with something that saves locally, and syncs back up to the server. The file share is currently 1TB, and will be 1.5TB soon. With SSD based Mac's, I can't download the entire share locally to each machine, and have it sync back with the server, so I was looking at DAM software or something similar.
Does anyone have any ideas to solve this very painful condition, that seems to come and go when we need to rely on things the most?
Best Answer
I work every day on InDesign CS5 & CS6 documents in real time, stored on GoogleDrive and DropBox to an iMac, Mac Mini and MBAir, all SSD-equipped. My Drive account is provided through my employer, while DropBox is my own personal account.
With a fast internet connection, the syncing is invisible. Granted, files are copied locally, but you can define the location of the Drive and DropBox folders to be on external local drives instead of the internal drives if you wish. Both Drive and DropBox allow for selective folder syncing as well, so users can set their machines to sync only what they need to work on.
For external disks, I would recommend USB3 & 7200RPM HDDs at a bare minimum, with Thunderbolt and SSDs at the fast end.
Alternatively, if the task computers can be upgraded with large internal SSDs, that may solve your problem.