As an embroidery business, embroidery designs are your most important assets after your employees and customers. Therefore it is important you manage and protect these precious things.

Back-up your deigns

Like any computer file, it is critical you back-up your embroidery designs and remove the back-up from your building. If the regrettable happens and your office build burns down, anything inside it including your back-up will be lost for ever. Therefore, take your back-up off-site and store in a secure location.

It is recommended you perform a back-up every night to ensure at the very most you only loose one days work.

Avoid Floppy Disks

Time and time again we see businesses store all their embroidery designs on floppy disk. This is the worst form of data storage known to man! They are unreliable, fragile, and a technology very rapidly being phased out!

Floppy disks store their data magnetically. Therefore, over time this magnetic data becomes corrupted due to everyday conditions such as static in the air. This is greatly compounded by the fact that embroidery floppy disks are used around machinery and fabrics, which are highly static prone – a recipe for disaster!

It is a common occurrence that a design is loaded from a floppy disk, however starts to sew erratically half way through the designs. Sometimes it is missing color changes, or whole sections of the design. This is a classic symptom of a corrupt design, typically caused by a bad sector on the floppy disk.

In conjunction to this, a floppy disk typically only has a 12 month life expectancy, before you can start to expect data integrity issues.

A floppy disk, at most, should be treated as a carrier device to take the design from the computer to the embroidery machine.

Do not use them for permanent design storage!

Digital Database System

A digital database system, such as the Wilcom Design Workflow is your best option for embroidery design management and storage.

Not only is a system like this designs for embroidery, it is also allows for additional security and protection, through user accounts with roles and permissions.

In addition to searching via design file name, Wilcom Design Workflow also allows you to search via description, customer, keywords and category, all impossible using floppy disks and standard folder storage methods.

Full color thumbnails and one scale views are also available for each design, making visually finding your design a breeze!

Finally, built-in backup systems ensure the protection of your designs.

For more information on Wilcom Design Workflow, visit www.wilcom.com.au/designworkflow.