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Do not use Dropbox as your primary "save" location!!


M Robinson

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Through the years, all of you in this forum have been incredibly helpful to me. Because of this, even though my problem has been resolved, I wanted to share my experience and warn you about a problem with Dropbox.

 

I produce a podcast. Up until my last project, I was using Dropbox to save projects as I worked on them. I never encountered a problem with this until my last project, which took weeks of Apple tech support time to resolve. The problem manifested itself in the middle of a project in which I was copying regions from one project and pasting them into another project. Things were going along well and out of the blue, the pasting no longer worked. It would paste properly on one track, but no data appeared on the second track. Apple support and I tried everything we could think of to resolve it. The problem was bumped up to engineering. Working with copies of the projects directly they could not duplicate the issue. As it turns out, this is because they were copying and pasting from a local drive, not Dropbox.

 

The bottom line--Do not use Dropbox or any cloud server as the location to which you save your projects as you are working. Use a local drive, make your editing changes there. And then, at whatever interval you want, compress the project file (zip it) and then upload it to Dropbox. Then, when you want to work on it again, download it from the cloud, unzip it, and start working again. It was explained to me that, due to the complex structure of Logic Pro X files, sometimes saving to the cloud can corrupt the Logic projects if it is done enough times.

 

I have learned my lesson, but felt I owed all of you a word of warning about this problem. Feel free to message me if you have any further questions! Meg

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Thanks for the heads up. We've been saving to the Dropbox folder on a local drive for a few years without problems, except that sometimes file modified dates don't get updated if the file is altered from another workstation. Is this how you've been using it? We're using folders, not packages for the Logic files.
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I am saving Logic projects as packages. I'm not sure whether it would make any difference if you saved as packages or folders. I can't address that. But the underlying problem is that the data is in a complex structure that has the possibility of getting corrupt when using a cloud server.

 

Understand that I have been using Logic for years and never ran into the problem I initially described with Dropbox. But Apple tech support has seen it many times evidently. Maybe the files are more complicated than they were with earlier versions of Logic. But if I were you, just to be on the safe side, I would save locally and then upload periodically to the cloud, compressing the files when you do the upload using zip. Think of it as a more conservative approach to dodging a potential bullet.

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