Collaborative project?

Question
1

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!

2

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.tpy file 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.tpy file 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.
3

Hello there! We tried to coordinate a small team (4 researchers) using a single project on Google Drive but something always goes wrong (usually because 2 folks use the project at the same time or forget to exit it). What will the asynchronous collaboration look like? Is there a target date for the beta version that you may be able to share with us?

Thanks! And awesome work!

Legacy Lab

4

There is no current timeline for this, but the way we would most likely address it is by introducing remote projects via some kind of service infrastructure (i.e. the project data would be hosted on the internet).

An alternative approach would be to find an effective way to merge/sync different versions of the SQLite file (there exist some generic approaches to this topic, though we may require something more specific to Tropy’s data model) - this would enable a solution that’s would be independent of a service infrastructure (i.e. it could be rolled out using any cloud storage provider). We’ve favored this approach originally but haven’t been able to come up with a satisfying solution.

5

Thanks for the info! Just a couple thoughts for the team…

  1. The Zotero model is quite interesting, and prices are reasonable. A Tropy Cloud could host the project tpy, plus photos, plus project config data. It would be nice if we could create the concept of “users” and each user could have some basic settings like language, while some settings would stay at the project level. I suspect most would gladly pay for a Tropy cloud instead of other commercial clouds.

  2. Agreed. Merging SQLites can be messy. Maybe instead of using 3rd party clouds, what if the implementation uses a user hosted NAS (Synology / QNAPS) with its own SQL. User could host Tropy and Omeka S on the same NAS. For the DIYs in the community this could be an exciting weekend setup project!

Has the team considered a Tropy version on MariaDB instead of SQLite3?

Looking forward to it. Let us know if we can help!