Dropbox - Selective Synch option

[Mary Tait]

Hi All, This topic may have been addressed previously but I cannot find it. As I proceed with my work I am accumulating more and more (literally thousands) of documents which I have attached to my Renunion 12 files. The documents are being stored on my desktop, in the Dropbox folder. I have been reading about "Selective Synch" with Dropbox, which apparently sends all the doc's into the cloud, freeing up laptop harddrive space. My question is, if I do this, allowing all doc's to be stored only in the cloud, what happens to the "path" for these doc's which are attached to Renunion. It would not be good to ruin all the work I have done on my file to this point, but it would be nice to free up hd space. Thank all. Sorry for the long ramble. Mary

[Deb]

My question is, if I do this, allowing all doc's to be stored only in the cloud, what happens to the "path" for these doc's which are attached to Reunion.

The path to the files will be broken and Reunion 12 will not be able to find them anymore.

It would not be good to ruin all the work I have done on my file to this point, but it would be nice to free up hd space.

I understand your wanting to free up some hard drive space. However, I recommend checking out other ways to do so.

I.e., perhaps you could move other non-Reunion-related files to the cloud?

[baddorfdeb]

I might be time to buy a small external disk, for extra space? I just bought a 2T disk for $70. A 1T disk was $50.

[Mary Tait]

Thank you Deb for your advise. I am so glad I checked it out before going ahead. I will continue as is, and look into uploading non Reunion files to the cloud. Another option would be to buy additional hard drive space for my Mac when the time comes. Thanks again for the tips. With regards to the tip from baddorfdeb ... I do have everything backed up on external harddrives, (2 separate ones) but I don't believe that would work for the doc's attached to Reunion, as once the hard drive is unplugged the path to Reunion would be broken. Thanks again.

[Tom Brown]

I only have my Reunion family file in Dropbox; however, I store all other files such as source docs, etc on my iCloud drive and everything works fine. I get around the Dropbox 3 device limit by having a different Dropbox account linked to the account on which I store my Family file. I just wish Reunion Touch would display a PDF file in its entirety instead of just the first page of the document.

[Paul Reitz]

Tom,

Not to beat a dead horse, but Mark Harrison's recent response to sweeneysb (Suzanne) deprecating iCloud prompts this late reply. I'd like to add an important consideration for using iCloud to store documentation files.

I keep Reunion-linked multimedia files in a highly-structured set of folders in iCloud Drive, and external drives to archive past family file versions.

I run Reunion on two computers, which can cause performance and multimedia link issues unless the documentation files are kept on both. iCloud Drive works well to keep them in sync if certain restrictions are applied. It's fast, doesn't need network-attached storage, dongles, or -especially- a thumb drive. There are no Reunion file linking issues because the Reunion app on both uses exactly the same directory path to the iCloud Drive files. This is not the case if files are shared from one computer!

I wish to emphasize that one should not think of or use iCloud as backup, to prevent it from deleting files stored on the computer as its capacity approaches full. In particular, do not use iCloud's "Optimize Mac Storage" feature. If that feature is not used, files remain on each computer even if iCloud starts running out of space. To preserve iCloud space for Reunion documentation, I do not "store Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud".

Time machine backs up iCloud Drive files in limited fashion because it is presumed iCloud is its own backup. In my Time Machine, iCloud Drive files existed in only the two most recent backups.

The main downside is that, like Dropbox, for best performance multimedia files must exist on every computer from which you run Reunion.

Another benefit using Dropbox and iCloud as described is that family files open so quickly that, rather than keeping more than one open [which Reunion really does not like], I shuttle back and forth between them with the Open and Close commands.