Hi guys. I’d like to set up a collaborative project linking students at two different universities who will add to and edit items in the project file. What’s the current state of the art for doing that with Tropy? Thanks!
The best way to do this at the moment is to create a new project and store it in a shared folder (for example, using syncthing or any of the commercial cloud storage providers). This allows you to access the same project from multiple devices. However, you have to be careful not to work on the project at the same time, otherwise there will be sync conflicts for the database file.
Here are a couple of best practices that help avoid potential problems:
- Before you open the project on a device, make sure that you are fully synced and that no one else is currently working on the project.
- When you’re done working on the project make sure to close the project (or quite Tropy) and make sure that your changes are synced back with the cloud / the other devices.
- Opening a project without making changes is always safe. Tropy does not alter the project file if you don’t make any changes. If you’re not planning to make any changes for a while you can protect from inadvertent changes by making the
project.tpyfile in your project folder read-only on your local device. If Tropy doesn’t have write permissions to the file it will automatically open it in read-only mode. This is useful if someone in your team only reviews data but doesn’t want to make any changes themselves. - It’s always a good idea to make a backup copy of the
project.tpyfile from time to time just in case. Some cloud storage providers have file history built-in allowing you to restore an older version of the file even if you don’t make manual backups. - Cloud storage providers will also handle sync conflicts in different ways. It’s definitely a good idea to make sure you know how sync conflicts are handled (and whether or not a version history is kept) so that you will notice a conflict early.