I would like to be able to work on my RW website from two different locations.
How would I manage the RW files to do this?
Can anybody point me to a discussion of the salient ramifications of doing so?
I searched this forum for input on Dropbox but most of the threads seemed out of date. I use Dropbox at my cabinet shop but the software has gotten so helpful now that it is almost worthless.
Could I store the RW files on Dropbox and access them from two different computers or is there a better cloud based storage service for this purpose?
I personally have not had a good relationship between RW and Dropbox. But it will work fine if you keep the project out of DropBox and zip your RW project before dropping into dropbox. On the second machine pull it out of DB and unzip. I do that and it works fine with the zip file.
So at the end of the work day I just zip the RW file and drop in in DB folder. Make sure both RW installs are the same. Same version RW, same version plugins.
Another alternative to to just drop the RW project on a USB thumb drive at the end of each day for the transfer. The thumb drive acts as a nice daily backup also. Having two installs that are the same is the key.
Dropbox will do strange things sometimes with RapidWeaver files because they are “sandwich” files which DB support told me they don’t guarantee to support. Some people report no problems with DB and RW. My RW seemed to lose track of what it was doing with RW projects. A small project would sync forever.
@1611mac provided a great reply. I just want to reiterate what he has written. I used Dropbox for years and years with no problems. Sometime in the past 12 months I would once in awhile have a sync problem. Then I tried iCloud. It’s been great and I only once had a problem. Because of Covid19, both of my computers are now in my home (instead of office and home) so it wasn’t a practical issue. But it could have been if the “good” version was only on my home computer and I was at my office.
All that said, the times there have been problems have been extremely rare.
However, there may be a variety of factors that play into how often these problems crop up. One might be file size. My RW projects are typically between 10 and 30 Mb. I would guess problems might crop up more with bigger project files. (All my resources are FTPed directly to my server: I don’t use RW’s internal resources feature.)
Another strategy I absolutely use when there’s a critical hand-off is I zip the project file. I have never ever had any problems with zipped files being synced with either Dropbox or iCloud.
One more strategy: name your project so it can be archived by critical dates. At specific points I’ll change the name of a project from MyProject.rw to MyProject-2020-08-04.rw. This way even if something goes amiss I can still use version N-1 to work on at my “other” location. This, BTW, is also useful for doing backups.
… so my final point: if you are not taking advantage of RW’s backup feature then that’s something you want to do right away! You can set it to once a day, once a week, or everytime I publish. This obviously provides a backup you can easily access via FTP and does serve as an extra syncing service of sorts. It also protects you from yourself and your computer: e.g. a computer crash.
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to use a thumb drive. I am already backing up the RW files to a portable SSD drive.
I can see how it would be important to make sure the RW versions were the same on both machines.
That’s something I probably wouldn’t have paid attention to.
The protocol I follow is to publish individual pages as they are complete.
I do this within RW and not with a separate FTP program. It is really quite fast.
The backups are automatically set for a daily backup from within the RW application.
I do a lot of website management in the morning before I go into my cabinet shop.
I now submit design drawings to customers via a page on the website rather than a lot of jpegs & PDFs. This protocol allows me to add comments to jpegs and include anchors to help explain points I want to illustrate.
Whenever I would make a change to the website it would automatically start backing up.
I learned that I could crash the back up mid-stream and modify a page if I saw something that needed to be improved or fixed. That saved a lot of time because I used to wait until backup was complete before modifying.
I have a Time machine backup and certain files in DropBox but I also have CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) make a BOOTABLE backup of my internal drive to a pocket drive each night. That drive (and others) go with me when I leave the house in case of fire or theft. I recently upgraded to Mojave which crashed mid install. My iMac was down! Panic! No… I just cloned my CCC disk to the system again and all was exactly as was. (I even booted up my CCC pocket drive and FTP’d a couple of time critical files to the web server.)