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Forum Discussion
corakat
3 years agoHelpful | Level 5
File A > "save as" > File B > "replace": This should work even if B is a cloud file
Hi!
I normally reassure our users that they can interact with Dropbox files "normally" without worrying too much about what's synced where (local or cloud), since Dropbox takes care of everythi...
- 3 years ago
Hi Walter,
I'm running Dropbox 145.4.4921 and I have "Your files are up to date."
I don't see my initial attempted edit to File B on the events page. But, in Finder on Mac, the timestamp on File B updated when I tried to overwrite it. It's just that the file stayed in the cloud, and the file size remained "0," so the actual edits were lost.
Later on, in consultation with Dropbox support, I manually local-synced File B, and then again attempted to overwrite it by editing File A in Photoshop and using "save as . . ." That worked, and that appears on the Events page. It just seems like an odd first step to have to take.
Thank you!
Karen
ppadmin
3 years agoCollaborator | Level 8
I'm having this same issue mentioned in this thread.
BTW, I tried posting to that thread for some reason my post kept disappearing.
In any event, this appears to be a bug and is not expected, or acceptable, behavior. We're using DropBox Business in a team environment. Multiple people open Photoshop PSD files and then Save As another format (usually TIFF) into an output folder. Often people need to overwrite files that were previously saved from a different computer. This problem is wreaking havoc. When a user overwrites a file that hasn't synced locally, the save seeming completes and the file's timestamp is updated on the local computer. I'm still investigating but I've been told that the updated timestamp is sometimes propagated to other computers as well. The file data however is not updated, even on the local computer. Even worse, if the overwritten file is then force synced, either manually or by double clicking, the timestamp, along with the file content, reverts to the previous version. Any changes are lost forever. This is a data loss situation, something that should be avoided at all costs by any file management system.
This also seems to be isolated to Photoshop. I tried similar actions with Adobe Illustrator and the built-in TextEdit app. In both cases when overwriting a cloud-only file, the file is properly synced locally, overwritten and then synced back to the cloud, all automatically.
Everything I'm referring to here is macOS specific BTW. So far I've tested with macOS 10.15.7, 12.0.1 and PhotoShop 22.5.2 (2021), 23.4.2 (2022), 23.5 (2022) and they all exhibit the same behavior. I know there is a known syncing issue with macOS 12.3+ but that doesn't appear to be related as this happens with older macOS versions.
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