Apple File Provider - Cloud Storage file paths not working properly with ArchiCAD Publisher

[Ebatte]

Anyone using a streaming cloud file storage service on MacOS such as Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, etc.? Of course you are. Welcome to the 21st century! In our case we use Google Drive, but the issue below would appear to apply to any modern cloud storage provider being used on MacOS.

Over a year ago Apple implemented a standardized way for cloud storage providers to hook into the operating system called “Apple File Provider”. This means that any cloud-based file storage system will now store streaming files in ~/Library/CloudStorage...

As you can see, this path is user dependent which creates a problem establishing a common publishing path for Publisher Sets. Formerly google drive was located in /Volumes/Google Drive. Now it is located in ~/Library/CloudStorage.

/Volumes/Google Drive could be set as a common path which was usable by anyone else in a Teamwork project, but once set using the new path it will obviously not be found by any other users.

Helpful tip for Google Drive users:

- Quit Google Drive for Desktop.

- Run this command in a terminal touch ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/DriveFS/fp_left_beta

- Start Google Drive and log back in.

This will continue to use the former location for Google Drive and paths will work as they have in the past.

Source

There may be similar options for Dropbox, One Drive, etc. 

Will Apple "fix" it? Unlikely. This seems to be caused by Apple's implementation. 

Will Google "fix" it? Unlikely. They will point the finger at Apple. Same with all other cloud providers.

Can Graphisoft do anything to "fix" it? Unknown. They are just storing a file path in the project. If the path is broken, then what can they do about it?

Is there anything else we can do as users to fix broken paths like this? Unknown.

• I doubt if unix symbolic links, shortcuts, or anything like that would help. 
• You could publish to BIMcloud instead of the file system. This is not acceptable for me or our staff.

If anyone has any thoughts on this matter please discuss.

[Barry Kelly]

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@Ebatte wrote:

Anyone using a streaming cloud file storage service on MacOS such as Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, etc.? Of course you are. Welcome to the 21st century! In our case we use Google Drive, but the issue below would appear to apply to any modern cloud storage provider being used on MacOS.

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Unless you can control when your cloud storage syncs to all the other computers, I believe it is recommended that you do not save from Archicad directly into a cloud storage folder.

Nothing to do with the issue of user file paths, but just because of the way Archicad creates temporary files while saving.

If your cloud storage tries to update while Archicad is saving, you could end up with damaged files.

By all means use cloud storage to sync your files, just save them somewhere else while working on them and then copy (or use a sync program that you can control) them to the cloud folder when you want them to sync in the cloud, if you can't control when the cloud sync occurs.

Have a read of this article... https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Project-Management-articles/Sync-utilities-and-issues-with-Save-...

So I am just saying, user beware.

It might work perfectly fine - until it doesn't.

And it is definitely not a replacement for Teamwork (BIMCloud).

Barry.

[KenMcN]

You are right Barry, syncing via a file provider definitely isn’t as good for teamwork as BIMcloud. Most of our models are on BIMcloud though layout books (when the file is too large to keep them within the model) and some .PLNs are not. I haven’t noticed this problem but might move these to BIMcloud as well, so thanks for the warning. 

The main problem for me (not sure about Eric) is publishing PDFs and hotlinking DWGs. In both cases it is much too difficult to use BIMcloud for file storage as it’s too inaccessible outside Archicad. Hence why we use a ‘local’ folder for the file paths. 

Hope that makes sense, but thanks again for the note about sync errors. Appreciated. 
Kenny 

[Ebatte]

Just to be clear, at my firm we exclusively use Teamwork. I’m referring to the inability to publish to a file system location due to the user-dependent path names that are used by Google Drive after GD was updated to comply with Apple File Provider.

[aronrica]

Hi,

I have communicated directly with Google on this matter and according to them it's a "bug".
Their engineering team "is working hard on a fix" (their words) but they couldn't give an estimate when it will be sorted.
The "bug" refers to the file path issue where the Google Drive is mounted on a User path rather than a generic Volume path as Eric describes.

Personally I think more of this as an "Oops!" rather than a "bug" but nevertheless looking forward to a solution.

For context and people looking to cloud solutions, we (a 25+ strong company running Macs almost exclusively) have been using Google Drive Stream / Desktop since late 2019 with Archicad solo files and linked material pretty much without any issues. We run solo files in many occasions but also use Teamwork extensively.
I did a comprehensive evaluation run back in 2019 with different cloud solutions (OneDrive included) and Google Drive was without a doubt the most stable software for us. 
I was actually pretty amazed how well it worked with the streaming solution and that shift from traditional file server towards a cloud solution saved us money.
We have had ZERO downtime on Google Drive / Workspace since December 2019.
Can't say that for our Microsoft Business plans using Teams with Sharepoint.

Fast forward to the File Provider debacle.
As soon as the Google Drive Desktop converted itself to using CloudStorage without any warning a couple of weeks ago the file path issue arose together with corrupted files.
We quickly "opted out"  and reverted to the old way. Now the ship sails steady again.

Looking forward we have been planning to start using Teamwork towards 100% in our projects for consistency and QA. But still in tandem with Google Drive.
I sincerely hope that Graphisoft puts a lot of effort in to the further development of Teamwork and cloud storage solutions. Even if it's best in class I think it can be even better; more resilient, even faster and even more secure.

[Ebatte]

Heads-up: Google Drive version 72.x breaks the workaround I posted. 

Alternate workaround may be to use user based publisher sets instead of public publisher sets. We’ve always used shared/public publisher sets for obvious reasons, but if we used user based publisher sets the path becomes irrelevant.

One problem with user publisher sets is that we cannot set these up in our project template easily, so company wide consistency becomes difficult to manage (like most things in AC).