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The Definition of Backup

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File Management
Written by Lou Gallo
Thursday, 19 February 2009 00:00
How do you define backup? Do you consider backup to be data redundancy or are you more in the camp that backup is disaster recovery? Maybe both? Much of our daily lives are stored in 0's and 1's especially our engineering data however how many of us are actually responsible for making sure our engineering data is safe? The common response seems to be "Oh, that is IT's job!" Talking with engineers, many are aware that the hard disk on their computer will fail at some point but none of them know exactly when. All of us can probably remember times in our past when a HDD failed and the pain it caused and the pain potential is growing with every year that passes. Look how much more data we generate with our computers today than we did just 5 years ago. The statistics are alarming no matter where you find them. Although most of the numbers vary, the ranges seem to be similar. Here is what I found: ~ 4 - 6% of users actually back up their data ~ 30% of business do not check or test their backups ~ 75% of business that do check backups find backup failures = NO BACKUPS! ~ 30% of computers will lose data due to event beyond their control ~ 90% of data backed up is within the same building as the original data. This list goes on and on with all types of statistics depending on the sources and year the statistics were collected. The trend is if you don't backup it is not a question of "IF", it is a question of "WHEN"! Many understand the impact personally when they lose photos or precious memories of their family but how does that apply to business or better yet, your engineering data? Well the impact can be devastating to a business, especially when the data contains all the lifeblood of the company. For companies that design products, the CAD data is crucial and it's backup methods should be viewed as important as the data itself. For engineers, a loss of their CAD data would obviously push out their completion date but may also crush their ingenuity and innovation drive. Typically most companies using data servers or even PDM will be running those servers on a RAID configuration, bringing local redundancy to the data. This is always my recommendation, however data simply being redundant is not "backup" until it resides in another location as well. Whether a big corporation or a single contractor, data backup can be done online, in the cloud with a few interesting services without physical copies being sent to an off-site storage facility. Here are a few that I have looked at: Amazon S3 (using JungleDisk) Carbonite Mozy SOS Online Backup iDrive HP Upline Microsoft SkyDrive Many of these have been evaluated in depth by PC Magazine and most of these solutions have a free model with a few GB of storage, a personal plan and then a business option. All of these have a "Set it and forget it" mode where you can point the local application to folders you want backed up and they will be copied up to the cloud automatically. Personally I wanted to make sure my selection would be with a company I felt confident would be around for the long haul and not have to worry about my "secure data" disappearing because the company went belly up. I currently use the Amazon S3 service which is not an unlimited, flat fee service but I use it with a $20 program called JungleDisk which is the client interface that automates the backups to S3 automatically. I chose this for my own use due to the AMAZON name as well as the costs associated (pay for use). One of the most compelling offerings has been Microsoft's with a big focus on cloud computing services. SkyDrive is a free service and is offering 25GB of online storage for free! So that may be a great place to start looking. These type of services are popping up all over the Net and can give great automatic backup of your local data quickly. The trick is to actually do it! The days of having physical copies of our designs are behind us and all of what we design is now electronic. Much of our in-process design work is stored on our local machines outside of our company's infrastructure and backup loops so that data is susceptible to loss. Take the opportunity to make sure your data is safe where ever it is (local machine, network drives, etc) and make a copy somewhere you can't walk to in 1 minute to ensure that your mind is free of worry and can focus on innovation! ~Lou

Where's my 3D Standard?

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File Management
Written by Lou Gallo
Saturday, 29 November 2008 00:00
As CAD products mature they all tend to “give in” to using a format standard in order to move CAD technology forward in the industry. Back when 2D was the standard, there were tools all over the industry that would create electronic drawings but communicating it was still mainly done on paper. As other post design tools came to the forefront, like CAM, reading the CAD file was key to leveraging the design process to avoid “rebuilding” designs from scratch. Enter DXF (Drawing Exchange Format), developed by Autodesk, which became a common 2D output from many CAD programs. Technology pushes forward into the early 3D days where parametric tools were not standard yet and the list of CAD platforms expands, bringing even more file formats into the game. Being a long time user of CADKey, the best 3D wireframe modeler of it’s time ;-), featureless 3D modeling was useful but time consuming and allowing the capability of viewing or sharing of this data needed a format standard. In those days I was using formats like ACIS, IGES (or “I Guess”) and STEP to name a few. These formats were read by many CAD platforms and would facilitate your typical fit, form and function requirements. These were featureless models but so were the CAD tools used to create them so the translated geometry was essentially the same as the original. Today the industry has many CAD tools, many with extremely robust capabilities and this “bridge” to post design tools has not changed much since then. Many users still import/export ACIS, IGES, STEP or Parasolid formats to other systems, however the need for feature-based models seems to be in high demand. Currently many systems rely on internal tools that can recognize some features however this translation is typically done from one side of the fence. This approach, although functional, tends to be inherently out of date or limited, resulting in ad-hoc models or inaccurate geometry reproduction. With various technologies to reverse engineer the feature tree on both CAD and CAM platforms, this seems to be evidence the market is ready for a format standard. Imagine if there was a feature-based 3D model standard that could be imported/exported out of most 3D parametric tools. Obviously this “standard” would not be able to export every complex feature especially considering most complex features today are not currently recognized. However, if this “3DSTD” file could translate the most common features like Extrudes, Cuts, Fillets, Revolves, Sweeps, Lofts, Sheet metal, etc. this would be a huge first step to true inter-interoperability in the industry. Various platforms could adopt this standard for both import and export, allowing clean transitions between tool sets. Proprietary file formats are the DRM (Digital Rights Management) of the CAD industry. DRM is used in the Entertainment industry (Music and Movies) to prevent piracy. The problem with DRM is it tends to get in the way of the end user who leagally purchased the content and forces them to find a way to use it the way they want to or need to. In design, we use tools (CAD, CAM, CAE, etc) to get our ideas to market and sometimes this process requires a variety of tools. Interoperability through a 3D feature-based standard could inspire innovation and allow everyone in product developement to focus on the design and not the tools they use. ~Lou

Where's my 3D Standard?

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File Management
Written by Lou Gallo
Saturday, 29 November 2008 00:00
As CAD products mature they all tend to “give in” to using a format standard in order to move CAD technology forward in the industry. Back when 2D was the standard, there were tools all over the industry that would create electronic drawings but communicating it was still mainly done on paper. As other post design tools came to the forefront, like CAM, reading the CAD file was key to leveraging the design process to avoid “rebuilding” designs from scratch. Enter DXF (Drawing Exchange Format), developed by Autodesk, which became a common 2D output from many CAD programs. Technology pushes forward into the early 3D days where parametric tools were not standard yet and the list of CAD platforms expands, bringing even more file formats into the game. Being a long time user of CADKey, the best 3D wireframe modeler of it’s time ;-), featureless 3D modeling was useful but time consuming and allowing the capability of viewing or sharing of this data needed a format standard. In those days I was using formats like ACIS, IGES (or “I Guess”) and STEP to name a few. These formats were read by many CAD platforms and would facilitate your typical fit, form and function requirements. These were featureless models but so were the CAD tools used to create them so the translated geometry was essentially the same as the original. Today the industry has many CAD tools, many with extremely robust capabilities and this “bridge” to post design tools has not changed much since then. Many users still import/export ACIS, IGES, STEP or Parasolid formats to other systems, however the need for feature-based models seems to be in high demand. Currently many systems rely on internal tools that can recognize some features however this translation is typically done from one side of the fence. This approach, although functional, tends to be inherently out of date or limited, resulting in ad-hoc models or inaccurate geometry reproduction. With various technologies to reverse engineer the feature tree on both CAD and CAM platforms, this seems to be evidence the market is ready for a format standard. Imagine if there was a feature-based 3D model standard that could be imported/exported out of most 3D parametric tools. Obviously this “standard” would not be able to export every complex feature especially considering most complex features today are not currently recognized. However, if this “3DSTD” file could translate the most common features like Extrudes, Cuts, Fillets, Revolves, Sweeps, Lofts, Sheet metal, etc. this would be a huge first step to true inter-interoperability in the industry. Various platforms could adopt this standard for both import and export, allowing clean transitions between tool sets. Proprietary file formats are the DRM (Digital Rights Management) of the CAD industry. DRM is used in the Entertainment industry (Music and Movies) to prevent piracy. The problem with DRM is it tends to get in the way of the end user who leagally purchased the content and forces them to find a way to use it the way they want to or need to. In design, we use tools (CAD, CAM, CAE, etc) to get our ideas to market and sometimes this process requires a variety of tools. Interoperability through a 3D feature-based standard could inspire innovation and allow everyone in product developement to focus on the design and not the tools they use. ~Lou

Changing the SolidWorks Toolbox flag.

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File Management
Written by Lou Gallo
Friday, 13 July 2007 22:16
I have talked about this tool before in the podcast but I thought I would take the opportunity to show the interface of this little data utility in order to bring a level of clairity to the table. This tool is located in the installation directory under Toolbox/data utilities. Once inside of the data utilities folder you can launch the sldsetdocprop.exe by double clicking on it. This will popup the Set Document Property dialog box. This tool was made to alter the toolbox flag that is recognized by both SolidWorks and PDMWorks Workgroup. Many times users want to take files from the toolbox and modify them and check them into the PDMWorks vault. If your vault settings are set to exclude the check in of these documents, even if you moved your modified Toolbox part to another location, PDMWorks will not allow check in of this document because of this internal flag. In order to remove this flag, selection of the Property state from "Yes" to "No" will now allow this file to be seen as any old SolidWorks file. On the flip side, you can take your standard SolidWorks files and change them so they are considered to be a Toolbox part when in an assembly or inside of PDMWorks. The tool also allows a nice bulk update interface by adding files and/or directories as well as a filter for file types. Once you have added all the files to modify in the update window, click on the "Update Status" button and the flag has been changed! ~Lou

Changing the SolidWorks Toolbox flag.

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File Management
Written by Lou Gallo
Friday, 13 July 2007 22:16
I have talked about this tool before in the podcast but I thought I would take the opportunity to show the interface of this little data utility in order to bring a level of clairity to the table. This tool is located in the installation directory under Toolbox/data utilities. Once inside of the data utilities folder you can launch the sldsetdocprop.exe by double clicking on it. This will popup the Set Document Property dialog box. This tool was made to alter the toolbox flag that is recognized by both SolidWorks and PDMWorks Workgroup. Many times users want to take files from the toolbox and modify them and check them into the PDMWorks vault. If your vault settings are set to exclude the check in of these documents, even if you moved your modified Toolbox part to another location, PDMWorks will not allow check in of this document because of this internal flag. In order to remove this flag, selection of the Property state from "Yes" to "No" will now allow this file to be seen as any old SolidWorks file. On the flip side, you can take your standard SolidWorks files and change them so they are considered to be a Toolbox part when in an assembly or inside of PDMWorks. The tool also allows a nice bulk update interface by adding files and/or directories as well as a filter for file types. Once you have added all the files to modify in the update window, click on the "Update Status" button and the flag has been changed! ~Lou

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