File Sync - Introduction

The cloud is a collective name for anything that is a web service. Cloud services have increased in popularity and availability to a point where businesses of all sizes have access to cloud computing and storage. With foresight and by customer demand, cloud storage support was added to Impact 15 and later products.

Use cloud storage together with our integrated file synchronization technology to increase the availability of project and standard files across users. It removes the need for exports and prevents cross-working. It is faster as users don't share a common storage resource such as a network drive (DFS). Traffic to and from the file repository will certainly be a bottleneck if capacity is not high enough. But this capacity is only needed when users synchronize and not when they work as in contrast to a DFS solution.

Security

The synchronization technology has security aspect built in by design. Since users need to be up-to-date, everyone technically has an up-to-date backup plus the file repository itself. Should you ever have to start from scratch, say if your computer crash, then you simply have to install Impact and synchronize the project you were working on. The file sync will retrieve the latest files and you can start working from where you left off.

The synchronization system is tightly tied to the user privileges. Administrators have control over when, where and what users can synchronize file to and from a cloud server.

Different workflow

A database stores information and a file system store files. Users share these often locally networked resources. Towards a database, this is not an issue, as it is very fast. Shared file systems are not.  If only a single user uses the disk, there is not much of a performance hit. If many users use the disk, it will have a hard time to keep up with requests. This makes file handling very slow.

If the file system is local, that is located very close to or inside an office, only minor performance loss is usually experienced. But when the file system is far away, slow read speeds combined with latency for requests over the internet can make file handling extremely very slow. This prevents organizations and businesses from obtaining a wide availability for their shared file resources.

Use cloud services presents a more modern alternative. The alternative is to keep a local copy of the file system at each office or even a local copy on each users computer. This way users will have direct and uncontested access to their local files and performance. Cloud storage support and the file synchronization technology enables this workflow.

File synchronization technology

In short, we call it 'The file sync'. To users, briefly, this is a window that appears when files are synchronized. A more in-depth look at this system is described in another article. The purpose of the system is to keep track of what files are new, changed, by whom, when, where etc. This is something we know as the file sync talks to the database.

Users with adequate authority can override the system if need be. System administrators can force files to be overwritten in the file repository even if the file in the repository is newer or unsynchronized.