Educated Attorney: Worldox TechTip: Fix Locked Files

Just the other day we got a call from one of our firms who use Worldox GX3. For those of you who don’t know, Worldox is a document management system that focuses on document organization and securing access to firm data. The call was a strange one, whenever a user tried to save a document, a notice would appear on the bottom right of the screen with a timer counting down saying that the file had been locked, waiting for unlock. This had never occured before so we tried to think what changes had been done in the past week that would have locked any files.

Traditionally, backup software locks files while it does a backup. Our offsite backup software particularly scans each file for changes and then backs up any changed files. This is typically how all offsite backup applications work. A good backup software is able to get beyond locked files, meaning, they should be able to backup open files and files currently being edited during the backup sequence. On the other hand, it is not as simple for users to open, edit and save files while the file is being backed up once the backup software has control of the file, thus the locked file issue with Worldox.

In our situation we had just configured continuous backup for this particular firm. Continuous backup is when your backup runs multiple times a day and backs up changes throughout the day rather than running once at night. The benefit of this backup type is so multiple changes to documents are backed up multiple times a day. In this case, we were able to minimize the locked file time by increasing the backup interval from every 30 minutes to every 2 hours.

For those of you who deal with Worldox locked file issues, talk to your IT people. Ask them when the backup is running and if that could be affecting your locked files. Also, ask about virus scan times, do they run during the day? If they do, they can also be locking your files causing you a headache. Those are the two most often culprits of locked files. If you like, you can even give us a call, we’ll remote in and help you out.