Local vs Server Saving

Question

What differences would be experiened if one saved documents created in say InDesign, Photoshop, FrameMaker (yeah, I know FM isn't in CS!) locally rather than over the network on a server disk?
Clearly saving over the network on a server HDD has benefits in terms of backup, recovery, sharing etc, but are there any major performance bottlenecks or even problems generated by doing this vs saving locally?
We've been having some issues with InDesign freezing up on a couple of PCs and somebody suggested this as a possible solution. Whilst I'm not confident it will be the solution I couldn't say what the difference would likely be.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Reading and writing across the network are generally slower than doing the same operations locally, so yes there is a performance hit. There is also increased risk of data corruption due to network problems that come up from time to time.
I can't really speak about Photoshop -- not much experience with saving over the network for that -- and I've never used Frame, but we get people who lose files from time to time in the InDesign forum. While not recommended by Adobe, working across the network is common practice in larger organizations (I'm talking about remotely storing the .indd file -- linked files in InDesign that are stored on a server are not the same isssue as working on the InDesign file itself stored remotely) where many users need access to the same documents. If the network is robust there usually is no problem, but I like to add that anyone working across a network should assume there will be file damage or total loss at some point and should have very good backup routines in place. Of course, that's pretty much true for working locally, too.
I coach production for the student newspaper at the local community college, and we have to work across the network there (for many of the reasons you cite). So far, knock wood, we havn't lost anything, though we had one incident about five years ago where a file would no longer open as original, but we were able to recover by opening as a copy.