Max files and folders synced in cloud storage
Good afternoon!
I'm wondering whether it should be possible to sync up the bulk of my Max folders with a cloud storage service?
While the obvious answer is yes, I haven't been able to make it work smoothly yet. I'm ultimately looking to seamlessly sync all my Max abstractions, snippets and patches in the cloud, and being able to work on them at will from both my windows PC and my older Macbook Pro. Any updates to a file should always be reflected on each respective device.
The issue is that in the Max 8 folder that appears in documents on my Mac, I can't just move the folders out of there necessarily. If I move certain of the folders (libraries, packages, snippets etc.) away from there, Max seems to create new folders for the missing ones. Not sure which of them behaves like this and not.
I haven't been able to find appropriate settings for this. Can anyone help me make this happen?
Bonus question; anyone got this working with iCloud Drive for Windows? Would be fantastic.
All the best,
Jonas
I know that lots of people report problems using synchronised cloud storage with Max, although I've been successfully synchronising my Windows Documents folder, including the Max 8 folder, via OneDrive for a few years now. There was a period of time last year, however, when a lot of strange things were happening, with files mysteriously disappearing. I think that this came about because Max was deleting existing files before replacing these with fresh ones (rather than simply overwriting existing files) and OneDrive was only sensing the delete actions because of the speed with which it all happened on the local machine. Since a OneDrive update was released last summer, that appears to have stopped happening. I can see another problem with using different machines is that it can take quite a while for OneDrive to "catch up" depending on how much data has to be copied, so if I happen to work on the same set of patches on two different machines, I always make sure that OneDrive has fully synchronised on both machines before and after running Max. Fortunately, I also have a server in my house that I also synchronise MyDocuments to using Syncback Pro and as that is much faster, it dramatically reduces the chances of things getting stamped on by accident. It also has a much better algorythm for decided what has changed and has a raft of settings to protect the data, such as not running a backup profile whilst certain apps are running. I also successfully use iCloud Drive, DropBox and Box but not for Max related stuff - indeed, I take great care to make sure that their roles on my local computers don't overlap. Syncback Pro has recently added a raft of interface options for most of the popular cloud storage systems out there so you might have better success using that instead of the normal cloud applications, although I notice that iCloud is conspicuously absent from the list!!!
make a custom package containing all your "stuff" in package format, wherever you like for whatever cloud service you are using. make an alias to that package folder and chuck the alias in to User Documents/Max 8/Packages (on windows you have to make a junction).
Thank you Andy for the insightful experiences, and Rob for the clear cut solutions. I’ll dip my feet into making a package, and make a junction link to iCloud Drive on Windows.