Archicad + dropbox

[Anonymous]

Hello hello,

I am helping an office figure out why their files and program is so slow and I am wondering if it might be because they have they Archicad files saved in a Dropbox instead of having them in a local folder and the libraries on a bimcloud.

Does anyone use archicad+dropbox and do you have any experience being faster/slower?

thanks in advance for your help

Regards

Luis

[Laszlo Nagy]

I don't think that is a supported workflow in ARCHICAD at this moment.
What I mean by that is that ARCHICAD does not have this feature called cloud-storage support so that you can open your files from and save them to solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, etc.
Some applications have this feature, but ARCHICAD currently does not.
So, this makes me think that there is additional coding/programming involved in making sure your application works well with these kinds of file storage solutions.

[Richard Morrison]

I have been using ArchiCAD with Dropbox for many years without a single problem or slowdown. All Dropbox are local files, of course, so ArchiCAD is not working in the cloud. However, only project and library files are on Dropbox. I would keep the program files on a non-Dropbox local drive.

[Anonymous]

Thanks everyone for getting back to me.

Richard do you mean you have the files saved on a folder on your computer and that folder is then connected to dropbox?

How big are your files/projects you usually work on ?

[Richard Morrison]

Luiscardoso wrote:

Richard do you mean you have the files saved on a folder on your computer and that folder is then connected to dropbox?

Well, that's sort of how Dropbox works. Dropbox is just a local folder on your hard drive that is syncing to/from the cloud in the background while you are using it. While most of my projects are fairly small (residential, mostly), it wouldn't matter. I have a library file that's around 1 GB that sync's just fine. You are not reading files directly off of the cloud. (I guess it's possible, but this would be very risky.)

[mikas]

I agree with Richard.

I've been using DropBox for years myself too. Being first a guinea pig for a few years, I decided to move our office entirely to DropBox. It's been working pretty ok. There have been some things to mention though. A couple of "what's happening" moments too.

Not everybody realises the concept. It would be better to equip workstations with mass storage that is enough for all of it, so you can use DropBox with "Local" setting. Otherwise, your experience might depend on your internet speed, every time you access a file. If you configure a file only to a cloud (DropBox cloud), it will load only on demand, it will load just after you want to access that file. And that's gonna take some time and patience, because it will start downloading the, possibly very slowly at the time being.

If all your and your co-workers and fellows and partners and whatever _files are "Local", those files are continuously being synced in background to your machine and to the cloud - and vice versa. They are ready almost in real time with every machine, if there is internet speed enough..

Ok, not in real time, but depending on your internet speed, almost realtime. Because DropBox syncs all the time, when an internet access is available.

Just observe the little icons attached to DropBox folder files. The Cloud, the Blue Sync icon, and the Green OK mark.

MacOS Quick View can sometimes break though. It's not a show stopper, but it's really annoying. There is a fix for it apparently, google can help there.

For me DropBox is a timesaver, with ArchiCAD too. I don't have to worry about files being on a server, or files being on sync. They will be everytime in sync, as long as DropBox gets it's bandwidth first (those icons to watch, remember).

I would not want to go back to manual server syncing with files.

Teamwork is another thing. And BimCloud.