BitBucket for Designers - Version Control for PSD, DWG, AI Files

Myra Kinko

Hi everyone,

I am looking for advice from an expert / Atlassian Support team. The question is following.

I am leading a design team of 3 people (UX / Visual Design / AutoCAD / 3D). We were recently asked to start using BitBucket to back up and do version control of all our design assets. This includes and is not limited to the file formats like .PSD, .AI, .DWG, variety of 3D file formats, etc. File sizes are often quite large averaging 150Mb each with some of the files exceeding 500Mb.

Also the size of an individual file storage can be quite large too. For instance my files take nearly 70GB. And this will likely to double in 6 months.

We have our internal version control system in place in Design. However the company decided to make a change and we have to make sure that we are doing the right thing for designers.

I did a due diligence check regarding BitBucket and whether it is suitable for design teams. What I found so far was no good news. Multiple sources are saying that BitBucket is not built for designers, etc. 

In order to make a right decision as a company we need an expert opinion on the matter. 

• Does BitBucket work for design teams? If yes than that’s great. If no, please can you elaborate the reasons why it is not suitable?
• Are versions of our graphical files well captured? How frequently the change is captured?
• Is there a chance that the graphical files get corrupted? If yes, how often this happens?
• Does BitBucket required any scripting / coding skills from the designers in order to use it? 
• What would be the cost of storing per 1 GB/month with BitBucket?

I will very much appreciate your response.

Thanks in advance.

 Myra

Mikael Sandberg

Hi Myra,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community.

If you are looking into using Bitbucket Cloud to store your design files there file storage limitations that you need to consider, 1Gb/month for the Free version (up to 5 users), 5Gb/month for Standard and 10Gb/month for Enterprise. If you are looking at Bitbucket Server then the limitation is the amount of disk space you have on the server. You do want to use Git LFS to store your files, Git is known for not handling large repositories, but with Git LFS you work around that limitation. Our Design team is just starting to use Bitbucket and so far they have not had any issues storing their files in Git.

The frequency of changes captured depends on how often you commit something to your repository. Git will not automatically do anything until you tell it to do something.

Is there a chance that files get corrupted? Yes, as with any version control software, there is a chance. But Git is better equipped to handle that since each user have a complete copy of a repository. You should also make sure that you have a good backup and recovery strategy.

No coding/scripting skills are needed, but you do need basic Git knowledge and you can use Sourcetree to perform most of those basic commands in a GUI.

The cost for Bitbucket Cloud can be found here, Bitbucket pricing, but if you need more then 10Gb of file storage (which Git LFS is using) your only option would be Bitbucket Server.