Saving documents over the network

I have always had my users save their Word, Excel, and other related documents and Files to an organization or personal folder on the server.
We have been using an (unnamed to protect the innocent ) application that has fairly small data files. The biggest file I have seen in this app is 250KB.
Well this "MS Certified Software Developer" says do not save files over the network, and I said "why, we save all other docs over the network?
They said I shouldn't be saving any files over the network but rather save them locally and drag and drop them to the server and if we had any corrupted files they would charge us to fix them.
Is this normal practice? If so I don’t know why I built a switched 100Kb network.

 

100Mb..sorry

 

Saving files over the network can cause corrupted files - the transfer through the cable increases the chances of corruption happening. File corruption is a lot less likely to happen when the files are saved to the local hard drive.

Sounds like they're trying to play it as safe as possible.

You could always save the files twice while in the program, once to the local hard drive, and again to the network drive. It's always a good idea to have your important doc's in two places anyway.

 

that is the biggest bunch of **** i have ever heard...

The odds of a file corrupting while transfering over an ethernet lan are like 1 in a 1000. The key here is: "MS Certified Software Developer ": Thats fine and dandy but lets ask some "Networking Experts" not software programmers. Thats the trouble with programmers is they think they know it all. Lets ask a CCNE or a MCSE the odds of a file coruption accross and modern ethernet.

I administer a 2000 fileserver that is hammered on all day long by 100+ users. We have never had a corruption due to transfer over the network. We have issues with certian programs (MS OFFICE 2000 on windows 98) being unable to save to a fileserver or deleting files from the server but that is OFFICE's problem, fixable in office SP2 or moving to windows 2000 pro.

Saving to Both disks Local and Network is a good practice because it adds a layer of recoverability in case the pc or server crashes beyond recovery. If there is a good back up schema inplace then there should be no worries.

Our server uses 2 36 gig mirror drives and those are backed up to a 80gig dlt tape drive....


While the practices they recommended are legit the reasons behind them are abit skecthy. Maybe if you were on a serial network you would have to worry.... otherwise ......


Tek

 

Thanks for the replies; I thought it was a load of **** too considering their software used to save fine over the network. Then they added some auto save features and all of a sudden you can't save over the LAN any more. I asked them when they were going to get it fixed because as most of you know trying to teach amateurs to do this practice is nearly impossible.
Then they say "Oh, you were never supposed to save over the network "
Geez give me a break!

 

Wasn't trying to say that saving over the network is going to corrupt the files, just that it's more likely than saving locally.

It does seem like they're playing CYA.

 

Stuff, nonsense, and somebody's blowing smoke

Could they maybe be removing a function or two in preparation for selling a "network aware" version of the program? I've seen companies block network saves and such unless you paid extra for their network version.

I agree that the other sound bogus.

We have several file servers and all users have their personal data stored in a personal folder and the group data is in various group folders. Nothing is saved locally unless the user wants to run the risk of losing it since many work from different PCs on different days and if a machine has problems, it is swapped out. Any app that wouldn't save to a mapped drive would be worthless for us.