Collaborating on portable project

Hi,

I’m setting up a new portable project file on OneDrive. I’m going to be working on it together with a research assistant for a few months; after that, I’ll be working on my own. At that point, I’d like to ditch the cloud and do all the work on my local computer (my internet is lousy).

I know we need to be careful not to work on it at the same time. But I have a couple of other questions:

  1. Currently, I have copies of the documents that I want to import into the project both in OneDrive and on my local hard-drive. If I import them from my computer, will my research assistant be able to work with them when she goes to the project on the cloud? Or do I need to import them from OneDrive? If I do that, will it be a problem later when I want to bring the project back home to my own computer and work offline?

  2. I’ve ticked the sync box for the project file on OneDrive. Is that the right thing to do?

Thanks! Any other tips to avoid losing work and getting into trouble would be very much appreciated.

I would suggest to put the photos and the portable project into the same folder on your OneDrive (if there are many photos, you can create sub-folder if you’d like to organize the photos further). That way, it will be easy to move everything to a different location in the future.

When you import the photos into Tropy, it’s best to move them to the project folder on OneDrive first, then import them from there – that way if you, or your research assistant syncs folder, they will be able to access the photos.

To avoid losing work, make sure to keep backups. Especially for the next few months, you’ll have to be careful not to work on the project at the same time (i.e., only work on the project when you’re sure that you currently have the latest version of the file) – going forward we’ll be adding ways to merge/copy between projects and other ways to help keep projects in a shared drive in sync. Other than that… keep backups like I said; should anything go wrong and you end up, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us: the project files are regular SQLite database files so there is usually a way to save or migrate data.

Many thanks for the quick answer!

Hi - I’m back because something is not working.

I did as suggested above. I created a folder on my OneDrive account and placed the photos in it, together with the Tropy project. I then shared the folder with my research assistant, who has started to import photos into the project and create notes.

Now when I open the project, I can see the notes and metadata, but not the photos. Meanwhile, she has gotten a message saying her OneDrive account is full - is this a clue?

Thanks in advance for recommendations. Is it something about the way OneDrive operates? Would DropBox be better?

I’m not using OneDrive myself, but basically, what you need to ensure in order to see everything on both computers is to have a shared folder setup so that the contents of the folders are kept in-sync. Tropy reads the photos from your file system, so if you can set up the folder in a way that you see the photos in your file manager Tropy should be able to load them as well.

It looks like the project file itself is already setup this way (that’s why you can see the notes and metadata) but that the photos themselves are not (maybe you just need to tell OneDrive to download them?).

If you run into OneDrive limitations, I’m assuming OneDrive would stop uploading new files automatically, which means you would not see new photos anymore either (so this would also explain your issue, though I would think that this would only affect the latest photos). If you want to share all the photos you need to make sure your OneDrive (Dropbox etc.) is large enough; however, if you don’t necessarily need access to all the photos all the time you could work around such limitations by putting your photos into different folders and sharing them only selectively.