You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Status:
Closed
Can we have an option to lock files we're working on to avoid conflicted copies?
My business partner and I (often working from different locations) are constantly working on the same documents and trying to save our work at the same time. Result: lots of conflicted copies of file...
Are there any plans in the works for a complete automatic file locking mechanism?
We are using AutoCAD products and would love to move completely to Dropbox, but not without automatic file locking between offices.
I.E.
User1 in Office A Opens DrawingOne
User2 in Office B attempts to open DrawingOne and but the properties on the file DrawingOne is set to locked so he gets notification from the file system and User2 can now only open the file with Readonly permissions
There seem to be a few good reasons this can't be detected automatically, but wouldn't a good workable compromise be to allow people manually "lock" and "unlock" a file? I would find that immensely useful.
- Mark
Super User II
But again, as has been said, thats not easily doable.
Every file is personal and different. It is a totally and utterly different set up to the way a network works.
Not entirely certain I understand inner working of Dropbox client, but this is the feature that is both necessary and possible to develop.
It could be turned off on per-folder basis by admin so to save network bandwidth if required.
Offline file access for modification should be prohibited IMHO and user should be given option to save under different filename if they need to modify so they are aware of changes, but again option should be given to enforce it or not.
Imagine two users changing 100 cells each in excel sheet simultaneously that gets doubled as result. Who will compare and merge data? Users, Company IT or Dropbox support? :)
First,
This thread is about file locking. If someone is offline and modifying files while someone else has it locked, the conflicted copy mechanism will resave the offline uses file as a conflicted copy, yes?
You guys are over complicating this.
