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Chronosync and Dropbox
New user of Dropbox here. Apologies if this is a stupid question, but is anyone using Chronosync to sync the content of folders in Dropbox with their counterpart folders on external hard drives?
Is this possible with Dropbox?
Thanks in advance
- I'm surprised no one answered this for you. The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is it's a little complicated, because ChronoSync doesn't understand that dropbox can have online and off-line files. In order for everything to work correctly, anything that sinks from dropbox to somewhere else via ChronoSync needs to be always off-line. If it isn't, ChronoSync will sync only the fake dropbox placeholders for the files, and not grab the actual contents of the files/folders. This ultimately means that if files are replaced on your external hard drive by versions in dropbox during the sink process, those files will be corrupted on the hard drive, because they are looking for their online counterparts in dropbox which don't exist on your hard drive.
This would be solved very easily if ChronoSync natively supported dropbox and it's API, like it currently does for Google cloud storage or iCloud, but they haven't implemented that as of yet. You're welcome to email them a feature request/suggestion for this though, as I think it would be immensely beneficial to a massive amount of people, and fairly easy for them to set up structurally given they already have that in place for other cloud services.
ChronoSync and dropbox are currently my main backup/sync solutions, so if you need any further assistance/have more questions please feel free to reach out to me or comment here.Hi,
I'm trying to set up my backup/storage system and am really just stuck trying to figure it all out.
I use pro tools and logic, and my goal is to have a redundant system between by Mac mini (which is always connected to an external hard drive), my Mac Pro, additional back up hard drives and dropbox. My idea is that I want to be able to work on my Mac mini, and have it immediately sync so that if I open the project on my laptop, the changes are automatically there. Obviously the easiest way to do this is to just work within a dropbox folder, but the issue is complicated by the external hard drive where I store most of my projects (instead of directly on the mac's hard drive).
Ideally I want to be able to access the external drive also from my laptop via Dropbox and have changes made there also be made on the drive, but I do not see how to sync the external drive with dropbox except to set it up as a backup. When the drive is a backup and I try to open a file from another computer, dropbox has conflict errors.
Further, I want all of my projects three times backed up, but in a way that if I make a change to something, it syncs to the backups as well. This was my intention in chronosync, but in trying to involve dropbox to have access between my devices and to share with collaborators, I fear I am in a labyrinth of storage and syncing. I'd really appreciate some help! Could you share more specifically how your system works? Is there a better option than dropbox?
My goal is to be able to access any project, anywhere and to have changes made synced across devices and hard drives.
Hi. Another lengthy post ahead, apologies.
Here's how I currently have my system set up, maybe that will help give you some ideas. I'll dive into your specific setup in a second My system is:
All projects are on an external hard drive, which is my main working drive that I take with me to sessions, work from home on, etc. I have everything under one working folder, called Sessions, for easier sync setup in ChronoSync etc but you could do this in multiple parent folders if you wanted.
That hard drive project folder gets backed up in the following ways, all via ChronoSync:
Mirrored copy in Dropbox: syncs daily at 2 AM, or anytime my Mac Pro is idle for more than 15 minutes. (In your case this would likely be your Mac mini)
Backup copy on backup external hard drive: once a week at 2AMWhen that main hard drive gets full, or I need to archive something etc, I've created an archive folder in my dropbox, and I simply move old projects etc into that folder, from within dropbox, then delete them from the hard drive. Just make sure you've moved the folders in Dropbox FIRST before syncing with ChronoSync, as depending on your sync configuration, you'll either permanently delete those folders, or recopy them unnecessarily back to Dropbox.
The reason I do the archiving this way is so that Dropbox doesn't need to re-upload anything, it just relocates it all, as most of the things I'm moving are at least 30 GB or sometimes 150GB or more.
As you can see above, I primarily work off of the hard drive, move it around with me, and allow most if not all changes to be made on the local external hard drive before being replicated on the cloud/dropbox and other backup drives. DO NOT use dropbox backup for this; you lose almost all control, and you're relying solely on dropbox's ability to sync/deal with conflicts, which as you noted, doesn't work very well, especially in audio production. The caveat to using Dropbox as any kind of active working directory, as noted above, is that dropbox wants to store everything locally, on your internal hard drive, and if you choose to force it elsewhere, you risk data corruption/loss because dropbox infuriatingly assumes that because it can't see the volume it's supposed to be on, that you must have had a change of heart and erased all of your dropbox content completely. (Someone please fix this in the Dropbox engineering team! It Is absolutely ridiculous that in the current technology world we're in, that you don't ask where the volume/folder is before deleting terabytes of data.)
I've gotten around this by literally installing a secondary internal PCIE hard drive in my machine, solely for dropbox storage. This allows me to use ChronoSync bidirectionally with dropbox, though it stores on the added drive, to sync between dropbox and my external hard drive. If you don't do this, and try to use dropbox files in online-only mode with ChronoSync, you'll get very undesirable results, see post above. Again, if ChronoSync would natively support Dropbox using their API or some kind of integration, most of these issues would be fixed/non-existent. Feel free to email them and request this, as the more people that do, the faster it will happen and the higher of a priority they'll view it as.I hope all of this makes sense, please feel free to write back here or reach out privately via email etc if you need further clarification or want help in setting up ChronoSync/dropbox etc for the workflow you're comfortable with.
Thanks so much for this very detailed and helpful response!
I will look into setting it up as you describe.Thanks again!
- Alex
Dropbox Staff
I was just wondering if a) chronosync and dropbox have gotten any closer meantime, and b) what happens if I want to sync FROM the HDD to dropbox via Chronosync.
Cheers.
