We currently run a Central Revit Server (2012) in our home office and a couple of local servers are located in remote offices. We only use the Revit server for projects that require collaboration between offices. For 100% local projects, the users tend to use a normal network drive.
With this configuration, Revit Server definitely does what it's designed to do, which is to say that WAN traffic is accelerated and the strain on our inter office bandwidth is minimal.
Right now, all I'm looking for is some advice on developing a sound backup strategy. The only Autodesk supplied documentation that I've found on the topic suggests that you lock all of your models before backing them up. Using this technique, it seems like Autodesk might be suggesting more manual interaction that I can expect from all users.
As of now, I'm treating the directories that store the actual Revit Server data just as I do any other vital data: these directories are currently backed up nightly using an EMC Avamar, but soon I'm going to start using Commvault for backups. The only thing that keeps me up at night is that I know that all of the users don't lock their projects at the end of each workday, and, in fact, many of them work late anyway.
With that in mind, if my backup device is backing up unlocked projects each night, am I getting good backups? Is there something else that I should be doing? How can I expect dozens of users to all remember to lock all of their projects nightly, before 11PM?
For sanity, I do manually lock the projects and copy the data elsewhere from time to time, but again, I need to make the backup process automatic as possible.
How does everyone else handle this?
[Apologies if there is a discussion group specific to Revit Server, but if there is, I couldn't find it. If there isn't a Revit Server specific group, perhaps there should be. Our company actually uses Revit MEP and Revit Structure, but I'm posting here to reach a wider audience since my question isn't specific to the version of the desktop application.]