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The non-profit I work for has recently purchased a 42TB NAS unit. This unit will store media production files: .jpg, .mp4, .pst, .indd, etc.

I'd like to be able to specify a set of rules for a folder & its sub-folders. For example, each project that is archived on the NAS should have the same folder structure:

Department_JobDescription
    - Photos
    - Videos
    - RAW HD

If a folder put on the drive doesn't meet that criteria, I would like to be notified. In addition, if the Photos folder contains something other than .jpg's, I would like to be notified.

While this may seem like overkill at this stage, 5 years from now, the well organized server will be dripping with awesomeness.

So, how could I set this up?

Additional Information

The NAS is powered by Windows Storage Server 2008. I'm a programmer and capable of writing such software. Since I'm the only programmer at the organization, time is tight. I thought I'd ask the community if something existed that would satisfy the requirements before I wrote it myself.

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  • That was a quick downvote. Please explain what I need to improve. The FAQ indicates questions about software are OK...
    – James Hill
    Oct 11, 2012 at 17:21
  • Typically, questions asking for software recommendations are considered off topic. You have a very specific requirement though. It's unlikely that a product exists that fulfills this requirement, but it doesn't matter — I've rephrased your question to ask for your real problem instead of assuming there's a readymade software solution. You might want to be more specific about what OSes are involved though, what NAS this is and how much control the clients should have.
    – slhck
    Oct 11, 2012 at 17:35
  • @slhck, SO is really the only SE site I'm familiar with. Thanks for the heads up and edit. I've added additional information.
    – James Hill
    Oct 11, 2012 at 17:38

3 Answers 3

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I've heard a few people recommend this to me in the past for similar things:

http://www.watchdirectory.net/

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This might seem a bit overkill but you could write a couple of nagios alert scripts. If you don't have direct access to the drive, you could install the NRPE daemon on a machine that has. The NRPE daemon allows the nagios host to execute commands on remote clients. The command will then return an OK, WARNING, CRITICAL or UNKNOWN status code that will in turn, signal a green, yellow or red flag in the nagios UI next to the remote node that executed the commands.

The UI is web based so you don't have to use the NRPE daemon if you only wish to monitor this storage unit. You could make the remote machine the nagios host.

You can of course modify the polling interval as you see fit.

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For file type violation notification or prohibition, you can use File Server Resource Manager's (built in to Storage Server) file screen function to enforce that only certain types of files can be saved on a volume (active screening) or you can get notifications when a file of a type other than what you want is saved to a volume (passive screening).

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