Collaboration with Pro Tools first?

[Darryl Ramm]

No! That is not what drop box does, it inserts a virtual filesystem shim on your computer. when you record to that drop box folder it is doing whatever it wants shuffling blocks remotely or not. That degrades performance and has none of the file close/commit/flush to disk semantics a local file system does. You should not record to a cloud drive folder. But again it will work fun until it doesn’t.

There is no such thing as “just syncs” things might sync within some time period with high probability, they might not sync because of problems, and the issue is the users and Pro Tools not being able to know.

Pro Tools thinks it’s writing to a filesystem, this filesystem shim is supposed to asynchronously make what is written locally appear in the web storage. Pro Tools writes a file thinks it is committed, on a normal drive it is, absolute 100% guarantee when done correctly the blocks of data are on disk. And if Pro Tools locally writes a bunch of files in the right way it knows they are committed on disk, together at that point of time. There is absolutely no guarantee that data ever makes it to cloud storage or that files committed at the same time, or in an order are written in the same time or order.

This stuff is obvious if you have an idea what is going on below the covers, have ever written or used software to manage distributed data. You need to either accept what I am saying of not, I am not going to keep debating how this stuff works has fundamental issues that can cause problems.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Dale-c

He told me that he would be recording in a location without internet access, which could be better. That way everything he does is offline, save the session, then go online to sync all at once. Probably the safest bet.

Yes absolutely just have him drag and drop to the Dropbox folder when online… ideally you may want to make sure he is copying (option drag and drop) a session there not just moving it so you know there is always a known good last session on his computer (a not uncommon mistake with new cloud users is to thing things have uploaded then delete the local files… which of course eventually deletes the cloud copy as well.

I think I will make local backups on my end. The biggest problem I can see would be user error since it is possible to delete files and have dropbox delete them everywhere. Plus you can never have too many backups.

You should ideally cover yourself with local backups on removable media, with some stored offsite, the cloud is a great backup location in addition to that, but a session that is being used online is not a backup. Again to my point about zipping up a session and uploading… the zip prevents anybody from accidentally just opening the sessions in Pro Tools and causing damage. And after a while you can do things like change permissions on those zip files so people/including yourself can’t accidentally delete them. You can also move stuff to folders that don’t appear on your desktop do it is less likely to be accidentally touched.

In my case I have a script that copies zip backup files to Google Cloud storage buckets. A different approach than Google Drive or Dropbox, but similar.