Win2K Server - Delete Permission Necessary?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I work for small drafting company for which I am the only IT person. Our
large collection of drawing files is stored centrally on a Windows 2000
Server, and worked on in-place by all the drafters. My boss would like to
configure our server to prevent anyone but him from deleting these drawing
files. Unfortunately, each time we turn off the Delete permission, we find
that users can no longer save their files at all. Does anyone have any ideas
on what is happening and how we can get around it? My best guess is that
when AutoCAD saves, it actually makes a temp file, renames the original to
something else, renames the temp file to what the original was, and then
deletes the original, but any input/suggestions would be very much welcome.
This problem is baffling us, and standing in the way of a major change to
our company that we'd like to make.

[Anonymous]

A.J. -
Your guess is actually very close. The autocad "save" procedure is something like this
(actually much more complicated than this, but...):
Check for the existence of a .bak file. If a .bak file exists delete it. Copy the
existing .dwg file to a .bak file. Delete the existing .dwg file. Save the current
drawing to the .dwg file.

If you don't allow users to delete items, autocad simply will not work. It is a required
permission. Delete inhibit actually doesn't do anything (good) anyway. If users can edit
the drawings and not delete them, they could simply open them, deleted everything in them
and save. Change rights are required.
If you are concerned about the data (as you should be) then a good backup program and some
redundancy in your server will do more for you than playing with the rights on that
server.

jason martin
frankfurt-short-bruza
"A.J." wrote in message
news:AE3F661ADDB16669E471F125506A27C4@in.WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
> Hello,
>
> I work for small drafting company for which I am the only IT person. Our
> large collection of drawing files is stored centrally on a Windows 2000
> Server, and worked on in-place by all the drafters. My boss would like to
> configure our server to prevent anyone but him from deleting these drawing
> files. Unfortunately, each time we turn off the Delete permission, we find
> that users can no longer save their files at all. Does anyone have any ideas
> on what is happening and how we can get around it? My best guess is that
> when AutoCAD saves, it actually makes a temp file, renames the original to
> something else, renames the temp file to what the original was, and then
> deletes the original, but any input/suggestions would be very much welcome.
> This problem is baffling us, and standing in the way of a major change to
> our company that we'd like to make.
>
>

[Anonymous]

To addon to Jason's comments. *Almost* every application (that edits files)
behaves similar to this (Word, Excel, WordPerfect, WordPad, etc).

What we do at our company is have READ permissions for the majority of users
on our "released" drawings. Then 3 of us have CHANGE permissions. If
someone wants to make a change to a drawing they have to copy the drawing to
a different directory, edit it, then go through our "release" procedure to
get the revised drawing into the "released" directory.

We have a directory structure for all of our revisions so that we can go
back to any revision, as well as a directory structure for our "released"
drawings. Doing this allows us to have full document control over all of
our documents (we do this with all engineering docs not just DWGs) without
purchasing a huge and expensive document control program (which of course is
another option).

HTH
--
Kevin Nehls


"jason martin" wrote in message
news:1E5DC40AC6FFE3FBC29844A31D339DC8@in.WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
> A.J. -
> Your guess is actually very close. The autocad "save" procedure is
something like this
> (actually much more complicated than this, but...):
> Check for the existence of a .bak file. If a .bak file exists delete it.
Copy the
> existing .dwg file to a .bak file. Delete the existing .dwg file. Save
the current
> drawing to the .dwg file.