Shepard Event Services Replaces Design-File Redraws With Restores Using Files.com Sync and Amazon S3

Shepard Event Services has been building trade shows since 1905. As the general contractor for an event, Shepard is responsible for the means and methods behind the whole production: floor plans, exhibit structures and graphics, rigging, permitting, and on-site execution, delivered for show organizers, exhibitors, and corporate event producers across North America. Since 2011 the company has been employee-owned, an ESOP with more than 600 employee owners.

Behind every show floor sits a design operation. Graphic designers, structural and concept designers, and floor plan designers work in Illustrator, InDesign, and AutoCAD, and the files they produce are the documents a show gets built from. A single floor plan can represent months of one designer's work. Shepard's business runs on design files, and a design file is only as durable as the last application that saved it.

Months of Work, One Bad Save From Gone

“We have people working on floor plans, and they spend months working on these things, and then boom, poof, they're gone.”

Until 2024, gone meant gone. Shepard's exposure was structural: the working files that carry months of labor had no history behind them. The design library had no file versioning and no point-in-time restore, so when a file corrupted or was saved badly, there was no prior copy to reach for. The only way back was to redraw the work.

And corruption was a standing condition, not a freak event. It came from places IT could not control. The applications themselves were a source: one InDesign release corrupted files badly enough that Shepard had to roll designers back to the previous version just to open their documents. In a single week in August 2024, the same floor plan designer lost two files to corruption. The first was a basic plan that could be recreated quickly. The second was a complex event file, and rebuilding it was a project in itself.

Corruption Couldn't Be Stopped, and 3 TB Couldn't Be Backed Up by Hand

Corruption of creative files cannot be prevented at the source. It arrives through application bugs, network hiccups, and save behavior no policy reaches. The only durable answer is recoverability: keep a history of every file, and be able to go back to any point in it.

At Shepard's scale, that was the hard part. The active design tree ran to 3 TB and was growing continuously, far too much to copy onto workstations or back up by hand. And a version history of a tree that size threatens to become its own runaway storage problem, so any recovery layer needed retention rules built in from the start.

That set the requirements: version every design file automatically, restore any file to a point in time, change nothing about how designers work, keep the archive in storage Shepard owns, and cap the history so it never grows without limit. Shepard's design tree already ran on Files.com, the mounted drive its design teams work from every day. IT built the recovery layer with Files.com Sync and a versioned Amazon S3 bucket of the company's own.

A Timed Sync Into a Versioned Bucket Shepard Owns

Files.com Sync turned the working design tree into a continuously versioned archive that maintains itself.

Using Files.com's remote server sync, the design tree pushes into an S3 bucket in Shepard's own AWS account every fifteen minutes, leaving the working files in place. No designer triggers anything or changes how they save. The drive they work on is the same drive it was before.

The bucket does the remembering. With S3 versioning on, each push that changes a file adds to that file's history instead of overwriting it, so a damaged InDesign or AutoCAD file can be pulled back exactly as it existed before the bad save. Restores can be filtered to a point in time.

The history is bounded on purpose. A lifecycle rule on the bucket permanently removes non-current versions after 90 days while always retaining the five newest as a safety margin, so the archive protects 3 TB of active work without becoming an unbounded second copy of it.

IT proved the pattern before trusting it: the sync ran first against the 30 GB floor plans folder, and once the versions and restores checked out, the same sync was re-run from the parent directory to take in the full 3 TB design tree. Pilot to production coverage took about a month.

Restores Instead of Rebuilds

With the sync in production, Shepard replaced rebuilding lost work from scratch with restoring it from a version.

• A corrupted or badly saved file is now recoverable from a prior version instead of automatically requiring a redraw.
• The protection applies itself to new work. Every file designers add to the tree is versioned within minutes of landing, with no backup job to run per machine or per project.
• The archive belongs to Shepard: its bucket, its AWS account, its retention rules, holding a rolling history of 3 TB of active design work.

Loss That Can't Be Prevented, Made Recoverable

Nothing about the corruption itself changed. Design applications fail the way they always did, and Shepard never expected to stop them. What changed is what a failure costs. Before, when a designer opened a damaged floor plan, the conversation with IT was about who would redraw months of work. Now it is about which version of the file to bring back. Files.com Sync, pushing the working tree into a versioned bucket Shepard owns, put a ceiling on the loss: a bad save costs the work done since the last push, not the months since the drawing began.