Digital Performer and the pCloud cloud storage

[gjensse]

Everything worked perfectly fine before these restrictions came. Now you are forced to buy even more expensive Mac machines. What will be next? Apple machines that can only run Apple software?

[James Steele]

Everything worked perfectly fine before these restrictions came. Now you are forced to buy even more expensive Mac machines. What will be next? Apple machines that can only run Apple software?

Not sure I understand what this has to do with DP and needing a more expensive computer? What is pCloud?

[mikehalloran]

Everything worked perfectly fine before these restrictions came. Now you are forced to buy even more expensive Mac machines. What will be next? Apple machines that can only run Apple software?

You don't have that quite right. Let's see if I can clear up some of the confusion.

The goal of all cloud storage services that let you work on active files is for you to store all your files there. This includes Apple, Dropbox, Microsoft and many more including pCloud—if you run out of room, buy more space on Subscription. Your system needs to be large enough to hold all your apps and plug-ins. VIs are not stored in the cloud and can be hosted on external drives. Some apps exist only in the cloud including GoogleDrive and SalesForce.

With iCloud and most Apple apps, the original files are in the cloud and you can choose to keep copies on your System drive—but only if you have enough space, otherwise they stay in the cloud. It's been that way since around 2009.

With macOS Monterey 12.3, Apple told the other cloud services to become more like iCloud. In the States, this means Dropbox and OneDrive from Microsoft. Dropbox files, instead of sync'd copies are now the originals. If you have enough space, you can have DB store active copies on your System drive—work on the copies and when your internet is good enough, the originals in the cloud are updated automatically. This works quite well. You can always move those files to an external but they are no longer active and do not automatically sync to the originals (you have to drag those copies to the cloud and overwrite the originals there).

Monterey introduced a few other wrinkles: Apple Pro App files (Logic, FinalCut) now only sync through iCloud, not Dropbox. Apple wants some of that money back, apparently.

Remember that the goal here is to sell cloud storage on subscription. You don't need a huge System drive for this unless you are sharing many and large active files and need to work them on your Mac. I'm in a part of the Silicon Valley with slow internet and some of the AV files I work on need to be on my System drive because working them in the cloud is way, way too slow. Small DP files hosted in Dropbox are fine (maybe a little slow on Bounce to Disk). By having an 8TB System drive, I never worry about this—I'm working on copies of files that sync in the background and never actually.

For many, a good example of an app that stores only in iCloud is Photos. Although we can store copies on all our devices (with enough room), most of us elect to store them on our iPhones only and access the rest through iCloud. If we want copies for this and that, we can drag them onto our desktop or Pictures folders and use/edit as we want without disturbing the originals. Not enough room on our devices? Apple is always glad to sell us more iCloud storage.

I have no idea if pCloud lets you store copies that sync automatically like iCloud or Dropbox or if everything stays in the cloud like GoogleDrive. I looked at it a bit and couldn't figure it out.

Besides your VI libraries, you can store your AppleMusic libraries onto an external to free up space on your System drive.

Since iCloud apps including Pages default to iCloud storage, many do not know that there are no copies on the Mac unless they chose to put them there—but you can.

None of these ideas are new. They go back to UNIX and SUN and are the realization of the NFS (network file sharing) protocols envisioned by Scott McNeely who preached a return to dumb terminals—all apps and files in the cloud. I worked for the company that brought this technology to Windows 3 in the 1990s when the internet wasn't at all ready for it. SUN was acquired by Oracle and NFS has morphed into what we have now.

[gjensse]

Hi Mike, thanks for the explanation. We were actually discussing Dropbox in the last posts, not pCloud.
pCloud is similar to Dropbox, but too slow in my opinion. It´s good for backups though.

So let me explain again. Last year I had a MacMini with a 250GB drive. Because of the small drive I had Dropbox stored on an external drive, including all DP Projects, Falcon samples, field recordings, etc. All files were offline, not online-only. This worked perfectly.

When the Dropbox folder was moved to the internal drive, I ran out of space. I tried to store some projects and files online-only, but it didn´t work. Digital Performer would often crash if files were not offline.
This is a problem that Dropbox has been struggling with since the move to FileProvider API. Check the Dropbox forum.

It was too much hassle using Dropbox Selective Sync all the time. I wanted to have all my studio files available offline, so I purchased a new MacMini with a 2TB drive, and now it works like before in a way, except that all the files are on the internal drive. I guess this is what Apple wanted us to do: buying new machines with larger drives. Buying more space on iCloud wouldn´t help much in my situation.