As many of you may know, I have been using Sync for many years rather than Dropbox to work with my collaborators, since the latter is blocked in China.
In spite of the fact that apparently Sync.com claim it is not suitable for use with Scrivener, apart from a few occasions in the early days when one of us was too quick to shut down before the sync’ing had fully completed, it has worked flawlessly for us.
In previous posts, I mentioned that my perception was that it was slightly slower than Dropbox. Well, Sync.com have just released a new major update, which they say has made if faster, with less CPU overhead. You can read about the release here:
Quite apart from my personal needs to find an alternative to Dropbox, it is worth pointing out that Sync is more secure than Dropbox, but read about that from their site.
Thanks for the heads up. Just installed 2.2.4.1 on the Intel Mini and it does seem faster than the previous version.
Like you I’ve always felt it was slower than DropBox, but regarded this as the penalty for end to end encryption, in addition to which I think all their servers are in the Greater Toronto area which may have some impact. I think this latter is to ensure that any data repositories fall under Canadian law, which may be a significant factor in attracting US customers.
My only gripe is that the app icon looks washed out and much lighter than the previous version which can make it almost invisible to my ancient eyes…
Hmm, I think you may be right about it being paler, but as I have it opening automatically on start-up, I hardly ever see the app icon as I launch apps with cmd-space and type the first few letters (with only apps actually running in the dock!), so the only time I see the applications folder is when I want to check which version of something I’m running.
On my Apple silicon machines, the menu bar icon seems unchanged (to my ancient eyes!).
Hello. In case anyone is interested, I use MEGA. It has always worked well for me with my projects. MEGA has a client for all platforms and it is one of the few services that perform encryption on the client.
It looks like I now need to follow suit and work from Sync. Two windows 10 laptops (one university owned one mine) that I have reliably been using Scrivener+Dropbox with will no longer allow me to enable or restore offline access (the option has recently disappeared on both laptops in spite of reinstalling Dropbox and many folders have reverted to cloud only).
Some time ago and for years I used Google Drive until I realised the potential risks (I had no episodes that I am aware of but I trust the experts here).
A sign of the times perhaps. I will use Dropbox for the backups insteaad, Sync for live Scrivener work.
I think the newest version of Sync is not working too well with Scrivener. I’ve been busy on other things, so haven’t really been investigating, but I seem to be getting regular, though not disastrous conflicts when switching between my MacBook Air and my Mac Mini. I’ll look more carefully when I’m back in Exeter, where the Mini is.
After I last posted, there was a period where I didn’t have conflicts with Sync, but it’s started doing it again.
So I watched the Sync icon and menu after shutting down Scrivener. I found two things:
The sync’ing process seemed rather slower than I expected;
Although the menubar icon and the dropdown pane said “In Sync”, in fact, although binder.backup and binder.autosave were already there, as I watched, UI-common.xml appeared and finally user.lock reported as uploaded.
So it seems that the closing down Sync’ing process is rather slow. Furthermore, sometimes, and today has been one of those the whole project uploads and appears as it should, as a folder; note, today I closed the projects and Scrivener and left the computer running while I went and cooked (and ate!) dinner.
Thus I suspect and hope that when I open today’s projects again, there will be no conflicts, and it is really important to leave the computer running for quite a while after closing projects.
