Why I consider Avid Cloud a massive failure

[daeron80]

EDIT: kind of solved. Short version, all the PT licenses at my work are under the manager's account. Thus, inviting others to cloud sessions is only enabled from his account. Even though my computer has a license for Ultimate, it's technically the manager's license, not mine. Therefore, sessions I create with my copy of Ultimate can't be shared via Avid Cloud unless I'm logged in as my manager. Seems like an oversight in design to me. But we can work around it.

Originally Posted by DigiTechSupt

Your account might need a cloud storage reset.
It currently shows 1.02+3kb of 1gb used.
Either a project exceeds the allocated 1GB cloud storage, or your Cloud Storage did not sync properly with your Avid Account. I suggest saving your Projects as Sessions (locally on any drive) before proceeding with the cloud reset.
You can start up a support case to proceed or let me know here on the forums.
-Tope

That would be my home account. When I log in to my.avid.com with that, I do see that I'm using 1.02e+3K, whatever that means. Which is funny, since I've never attempted to use the cloud at all with that account.

I'm trying to use my work account for this, which is a different email. On my end, my account says 1% used. And there aren't any sessions. I didn't record a significant amount of audio during the testing process, and I deleted all the projects afterward. My only current cloud project is not owned by me.

Further, that one project says it's owner is 44% full, even though it's also his only project, and it's empty most of the time. When we finish a remote recording session, we grab the audio from cache, copy it to our SAN and one other location. Then we delete all audio from the session, so we're starting with a theoretically empty project each time. Yet the owner's account continues to get fuller. Pretty soon, we'll have to delete it and one of us will create a new one to share with the other two, if that even turns out to be possible.

[EDIT:] Support case submitted. Referenced this thread. Verified that my account shows, both in Avid Link and on my.avid.com, that I'm using 13.86 KB, 1 GB Available.

[daeron80]

Originally Posted by fastermaster

My Avid Cloud is there abandoned with no space available due to a bug and a non responsive Avid customer service to solve the problem.
...
Projects tend to get bigger and bigger as deleting unused files is very tricky if not almost impossible.
...
The way it works makes it impossible to see what happens in the background, you cannot even see how much data is being transferred and understand if there is a problem.

I've found solutions for those. And first of all, I must say, Avid Customer Service was very responsive. And if I didn't answer their email same day, they resent the response again the next day! They stuck with me until it was solved.

So, the difficulty with deleting data from projects can be solved with a workaround: delete the project. Not ideal, I know. But it works. If you delete a project, its data will be subtracted from your total. If you need to keep part of the project, export it to an offline project. Delete the project from the cloud. Then import the needed data to a new cloud project. Bit of a hassle, but at least you're not stuck for good.

As for seeing what happens in the background:

1. Open the Task Manager while using the project. You'll be able to watch data coming your way.
2. Right-click (alt-click) the title bar to show the path (this only works on Mac) and open the item that looks like a cloud project icon. Inside it is the normal session structure, Audio Files folder and all. You can see exactly what is being stored there. You can copy and delete data from it as needed. On Windows, you would need to find the path where project cache is stored and navigate there manually.