Hey all,

I'm making a filemaker database that will contain lots of pictures (currently 3000 jpegs weighing about 400kb each, and about 1gb of video files and expanding)

i'm imagining storing them within the database will make it slow and unweildy so i've decided yto store the pictures as refernces. the database is to be used by about 5-10 people and is being stored on a mac running tiger, and opened remotely from clients on other macs running a mix of tiger and leopard.

the images are stored on a firewire drive that is connected directly to the computer hosating the database. the problem i'm having is that once the images are loaded into the container fields, after a period of time (anything from 30minutes plus) - the container stops displaying a preview of the image and gives a "file not found" error message in the field. when the images are stored on the computer's hard drive, there isn't this problem, and when the images are stored within the filemaker file, no problem. (and obviously i'm not changing the location ofd the images of the drive)

so i'm imagining it is a problem with the external hard drive and the file refernce paths - but i'm not sure how to fix it as it isn't desirable to have the images stored on the computer (backups etc)

i'm not terribly familiar with macs, so i was just looking for a bit of advice on the problem, how to debug it, or to solve it would be great! so any advice very much apreciated, thanks

gina

This is not a good arrangement and I doubt it would be any better using USB drives.

Is the drive going to sleep?

You would be far better off with the original arrangement and use the FW drive as a backup - as it was intended.