Me and my buddies have a small design studio going on here at our office.
We always work from the network when working on any of our Adobe files.
Our server is on Windows 2012 Standard with 9TB storage space RAID 50. It's got shadow copy turned on and backup on top of that.
It's been working for the last 2 years and has saved us a bunch of times when we accidentally delete files or overwritten the wrong version, we use shadow copy to restore instantly.
However, lately our Illustrator files have been getting bigger and our linked PSD files even bigger to a point we are working on 1GB of total file size between all the linked PSD files, some are 300MB, others are 200MB, 1 might be 500MB.
The problem we have run into lately is that out Adobe Illustrator is running to a slow crawl, to the point where you can't move anything every 1 minute.
This does the same when we work with InDesign using linked images that are big.
We also know that if we embed the images, then we do not get the slowdown or crawling feel.
If we use the linked images with our entire project on our local c: drive or local hard-drive then it runs normal as well.
So what do other design firms do? Especially magazine publishers?
a) do I need to switch to Mac desktop and Mac server using the Unix network protocol (would that fix the linked images on the network issue)?
b) get 10GB network cards and switches and hope that it would work faster?
c) do other big design firms use other third party software such as Xinet (North Plains) or something similar to that in terms of a digital asset management system (and would it solve the whole linked images issue over the network)?
d) or is there another workflow I am totally unaware of?
Adobe Support Claims: no support with any files worked over the network. Recommended workflow - do all your projects in your local hard-drive, then copy to server after project is finished. (Is this why adobe Cue server was abandoned after 2 releases).
I am looking for any help which is greatly appreciated.