Cloud Drives

Do we have enough damage to change Audacity so it can deal with Network and Cloud Drives?

Yes, remote drives certainly won’t work with any job demanding tight integration between Audacity and its storage, but that’s no reason to destroy a show by simply saving and recalling a Project in a cloud drive. That or something similar appears to be happening in multiple forum posts.

Koz

I don’t think that’s what’s destroying projects.
I think the problem occurs when they try to open the project in a cloud drive.

It’s not yet fully understood what is going wrong, but it’s probably to do with the fact that: for secure database transactions, the drive must support file locking. Cloud drives may have their own form of file locking to enable the remote and local copies to be synchronized while preventing file access when the file is in an invalid state. I suspect there is an incompatibility between cloud drive file locking, and normal file locking.

I suspect that it is a similar kind of problem as the problem with Skype / Zoom / et al. When an app aggressively takes control of a computer resource for it’s own purpose, it can interfere with other apps that require normal access to that resource. The difference being that in this case, the resource is “file access” whereas for Zoom / Skype / … it’s access to the sound system.

Do we have any documentation about cloud issues outside of the forum? In the online manual I see references only to speed issues.

Also, I don’t seem to find any restriction while skimming the SQLite webpage here: Appropriate Uses For SQLite

I’m wondering if anything in the 2.x section applies: How To Corrupt An SQLite Database File

Thanks for the reference. Do you suppose we should document these potential issues in the manual?

The manual already says:

You are strongly advised NOT to save your active project to an external USB stick/disk, networked storage or cloud storage

I’ve seen that one of the developers is looking into the “extreme slowness” issue. I expect that the documentation will be updated as we learn more about the issues.