Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
I think you aren't giving Dropbox enough credit. It is extremely robust. Are you able to duplicate this situation?
BOb
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In what way is it robust? This is just how sync programs work. They can't integrate changes from two machines into a database unless they know exactly how that database works and I'm certain dropbox does not know how Calibre works. All they can do is copy the database files.
Cloud based sync programs can't update changes to or from the laptop if the laptop hasn't got a connection to the cloud. If you work on the laptop when you don't have an internet connection (as someone said they wanted to do so they didn't need to rely on the built in content server), those changes don't appear on any other dropbox machine. They sit on the laptop until it gets connected to the cloud.
If the owner comes home and works on Calibre there, you've got a conflict at the least. If you're working on Calibre at home and someone turns on the laptop, the home version may have changes in memory, just as dropbox tries to update the home copy of metadata.db as the laptop comes online. I suspect that will lead to corruption for the same reason that running two version of Calibre at the same time will.
Someone here (you?) said it posted a "conflicted" copy in the first situation. That's what I would expect, and it's a help. You could rename the conflicted copy of metadata.db, export the opf file for missing records, switch back to the other metadata.db and import to recover the lost data. A corruption would be more of a problem, and that could end up being replicated to everything. As I said, I'm not trying to denigrate dropbox. It just needs to be used with some care and knowledge.
Do you have any reason to believe it doesn't work as I described?