NW Mobile & Archive attribute
Graham Glen
I've been considering installing NW Mobile on all of the laptops in use
in our company. In theory it would make life very easy for our mobile
users to have exactly the same environment out on the road as in the
office.
At the moment I'm not looking to give them any dialup access (in the
places they go to they are lucky to get electricity, never mind a
reasonable phone connection!).
To that end, I've bought some licences and installed it on my laptop to
experiment with, and for the most part it works very nicely. I have
however found one situation for which I cannot see a clean solution and
would appreciate any comments from anyone else who has been here before.
The way I envisage it being used, is that people will replicate their
entire home drive and the drives which contain things like document
templates.
If a user creates a file on the server it will automatically have the
archive attribute set on. Come the end of the day when the user logs out
their laptop is updated and the new file is copied over, still with the
archive attribute on.
Overnight the backup runs on the server and the new file is backed up
and the archive attribute cleared.
At some point the user comes back to the office, having updated their
local copy of this file. When they connect their laptop back into the
network and log in the synchronisation process begins, and will then
come up with conflicts because the copy of the file on the server
doesn't have the archive attribute set, whilst the copy on the laptop
has it set.
Unfortunately there's no option in the resolve conflicts screen to
ignore the attribute change on the server and overwrite that copy
anyway.
The only way I can see to stop this happening is for the users login
script to flag *all* of their files to have the archive attribute. This
is going to slow down login for them a lot though.
Does anyone have any other ideas?
Graham
--
Graham Glen gra...@irving.demon.co.uk
".. and it always was possible to measure the distance between so-called
management and the so-called creative by the time it took for a memo to go
in one direction and a half-brick to come back in the other."
Dennis Potter
James S. Noble
In reply to your quandry, would it not be wiser to utilize the date /
time stamp of the file creation date as your backup criteria on the
user's personal volume? I am assuming you are using Arcserve, or Arcada
to perform your backups, therefore, you do not have to use the Archive
Bit as your determination as to a files archive status.???
Just a thought,
Jim Noble.
Where ever you are, someone else is Not. .J.N.
Graham Glen
In article <320FAC...@rocktenn.com>, "James S. Noble"
<Jno...@rocktenn.com> writes
>
>In reply to your quandry, would it not be wiser to utilize the date /
>time stamp of the file creation date as your backup criteria on the
>user's personal volume? I am assuming you are using Arcserve, or Arcada
>to perform your backups, therefore, you do not have to use the Archive
>Bit as your determination as to a files archive status.???
>
I'm using Storage Manager, and I *could* change my backup jobs to do
things a little differently for those user you run NWMobile, but it
would be a real pain.
It may turn out to be less of a problem than I first thought though. It
affects about 10 files of mine on a daily basis (where an entire
application is replicated, and network and offline copies get changed
daily), I may change my login script to put the archive bit back on
those files.