Cloud Storage for drawings

[AlanW]

Is anyone using Cloud storage for all their server everyday working files?

Our office is considering it but using Team viewer to download drawings they can take 20min of so for an average drawing, then i work on it at home.

My concern is if i am continually saving this file as i am working on it is it as instant save as quick as it is to a local server?

 

Any comments welcome

Alan

[Pat Stanford]

A cloud server will not be an effective solution. Especially if you have multiple people working on drawings.

 

I think there are a lot of people who are using Cloud syncing services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive seem to work well. You have a local copy of the files that gets synced back to the cloud and then out to anyone else who has it synced when changes are made.

 

This thread may give you a starting point. I know there are other threads talking about the options also.

 

 

[AlanW]

@Pat StanfordThanks for reply Pat.

Am Interested in knowing how much they pay for and what speed is their upload and download?

Also what is the time delay in getting files up and down?

More comments welcome.

Seems like everyone is dragging the files up and down and working on them locally, not using cloud as a server, as we do in the office, may be wrong but still need to get head around this if its possible and feasible as an everyday working setup.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Peter Vandewalle]

The time delay isn't important. The actuals save is done to your local drive. After that action the sync runs through the cloud app. You won't even notice that when working in Vectorworks.

I use Google Drive for work, iCloud drive for my personal work, Vectorworks Cloud Services for the exchange with Nomad. All of that just runs in the background.

When using the cloud as a server, that's how it should be done imho.

 

Google Drive (not suited for Project Sharing): https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_ie/pricing.html

Vectorworks Cloud Services (suited for Project Sharing): included in your Vectorworks license.

Dropbox (suited for Project Sharing): https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison

[Pat Stanford]

The down side to syncing services is that you need to have enough local hard disk space to store the local copy of the file. You work on the local copy and save to the local copy. As Peter says that local copy is then synced in the background to the server.

 

I believe all of the syncing services have some type of clash detection. So if you work on File A and someone else opens it at the same time, both of your sets of changes will be saved. Not necessarily integrated, but both version will be saved so you can manually figure out how to combine them.

 

For an example. I opened a big (~500 MB VW Filed in VW2022 and then saved it to Dropbox.  The original save took approximately 8 minutes on my 30 Meg Down/7Meg Down cable modem.  I then added about 500 textured solids. This increased the file size by about 2MB. The Dropbox sync in the background completed in less than 1 minute.

 

HTH

[Peter Vandewalle]

9 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

I believe all of the syncing services have some type of clash detection. So if you work on File A and someone else opens it at the same time, both of your sets of changes will be saved. Not necessarily integrated, but both version will be saved so you can manually figure out how to combine them.

Most cloud services will just warn you when you open a file that is in use by someone else, just like a regular server does.

if you need tobbe able to use a Vectorworks file simultaneously, you’ll need to go the project sharing way.

[Pat Stanford]

Dropbox seems to have "conflicted copy" detection.

 

https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/conflicted-copy

[Dave Donley]

Vectorworks Cloud Services will automatically avoid conflict copies for VWXP project files. 

 

Also there is a control in the desktop cloud app settings to control which folders are synced to your local drive, so you can keep more on the cloud without using up your local drive.