Shepard Replaced Windows File Servers With a Path-Preserving J: Drive on Files.com

Shepard is a general services contractor for trade shows and expositions. When it serves as the general contractor for an event, Shepard is responsible for the construction and execution of the whole show: exhibit structures, rigging, floor plans, graphics, and on-site production. Headquartered in the Atlanta metro area, the company produces events nationally for show organizers, exhibitors, and corporate event producers.

Behind every show it builds is a design organization: graphic designers, structural and concept designers, floor plan designers, and a large-format production operation, all working in Illustrator, InDesign, and AutoCAD. Every show generates project files, assets, photos, and imagery, and finished shows are not thrown away, because designers pull material from past events to build new ones. The result is a design library that grows with every show on the calendar and never shrinks. That library outgrew Shepard's infrastructure, but moving it could not change the fixed J: drive paths embedded in years of InDesign and AutoCAD work.

A Library Too Big for the Servers and Too Big for the Workstations

By the end of 2015, Shepard's IT Director, Jody Weathington, was carrying 6 to 7 TB of design data on local storage, growing about 200 GB every month. The data needed a durable home, and it could not simply be parked somewhere: staff needed to keep reaching it as a network share.

Distributing it to the people who used it was not an option either.

“We just have so many files, we would fill their hard drives up.”

Any tool that worked by syncing the library down to each machine was disqualified by the scale of the library itself.

The harder constraint was how designers work. An InDesign document links out to dozens of other files that it pulls in to build the page, and AutoCAD drawings reference material at fixed paths. Whatever replaced the storage had to present itself as a normal network drive with the same folder tree, or the links inside years of project files would break. Designers work against paths, not portals.

The Archive Moved First

The fix had to do three things: take terabytes now, absorb hundreds of gigabytes of new work every month indefinitely, and hand it all back to users as a mapped network drive. Shepard selected Files.com to be that drive.

The first phase was the archive. In early 2016, nearly 4.5 TB of show material moved onto Files.com, a migration large enough that Shepard evaluated physical drive shipment and a bulk-transfer appliance before moving the data over tuned FTP transfers. Once loaded, the archive was reachable to staff as a mapped network share over WebDAV, and the platform began absorbing the monthly growth.

Then the Designers Went Remote

The team's active working files stayed on internal Windows file servers, mapped as the J: drive, and for years that held. Remote work broke it. By 2022, most of the design team no longer worked in the office. A designer at home connected over VPN and opened an InDesign file, which then pulled every linked file down the tunnel in the background while the application appeared to hang. The file servers had not failed. They had stopped reaching the people who used them, and the working drive needed to go where the archive had already gone.

Shepard prepared by moving identity first. In 2022, sign-in moved to Okta SAML SSO backed by Active Directory, with directory groups mapped to Files.com groups, so that folder permissions across the design tree followed group membership instead of being set designer by designer.

The J: Drive, Rebuilt on Files.com

In 2023, the design organization's J: drive moved onto Files.com. Through the Files.com Desktop App, the drive mounted under the same letter on every managed workstation, preserving the folder tree and paths the team already knew. Archived shows sat on the same site in read-only folders, so designers could pull material from past events on demand.

The internal file servers came out of the design team's working path, and the drive stopped depending on a VPN or the office network. A designer at home could now open a linked InDesign file against the shared J: paths without waiting through a background VPN download that looked like a crash.

A Decade of Growth With No Hardware Refresh

With the working drive in production on Files.com, Shepard replaced its on-premises design file servers and a VPN-bound remote workflow with one mounted drive that reaches every designer.

• The whole design organization, from graphics and structural design to floor plans and production, works from the same J: drive with the same paths, whether the designer is in a branch office or at home.
• No workstation carries the library. The multi-terabyte tree lives on Files.com, and a designer's machine holds only the work in front of them.
• Storage across Shepard's Files.com site passed 38 TB by 2024. Shepard absorbed that decade of growth without buying, racking, or refreshing a design file server.
• Past shows stay live instead of buried: read-only archive folders on the same drive, pulled on demand.

The compounding result is that growth stopped being an infrastructure problem. The library now grows about 500 GB a month, driven by design output, and each new show is a new folder in the tree rather than a capacity project for IT.

Moved in Phases, Proved at Each Step

Shepard never ran a cutover weekend. The archive moved in 2016 and proved Files.com could carry the volume. Identity moved in 2022 so permissions would follow the directory. The working drive moved last, in 2023, onto a platform that had been holding the company's data for seven years. A multi-terabyte file server estate does not have to move in one jump; each phase can run in production before the next depends on it.

Today, a Shepard designer at home opens a linked InDesign document, and the links resolve against the same J: paths the whole team shares. The drive is Files.com, and the Windows file servers it replaced no longer sit in the design team's working path.