Dropbox & Smart Content Installation

ramasters

Hi there,

I'm looking to understand syncing on Dropbox. My understanding would be that if I have all my files stored on dropbox on my laptop and PC, that I could render on my PC while I work on my laptop. This mostly works and, aside from Dropbox being slow to sync at times, is generally great.

Except that the 'smart content' is not the same on both computers and, at times, it seems like they aren't actually synced. For instance, one time I created a scene, set it to render, only to find that the PC didn't have the figures installed, despite the fact that they were installed using the DIM and the files were synced in Dropbox. It doesn't seem to happen with clothes as I can have clothes not installed through the smart content tab and still have it render fine, but with shaping it's a different story.

So my question is why do I have to install the files using DIM and then again in the smart content panel? Why is installing through the DIM not enough to have the files synced across computers? Is there anything I can do to better manage this, as my Daz folder size is large enough that I'm not buying things out of pragmatic space concerns haha.

Thank you!

Richard Haseltine

Keeping the databases in sync is a problem that i think everyone with a shared content folder has hit. You can't just sync the ContentCluster folder as copying from/to it while DS (or DIM or Carrara) is open would be likely to corrupt the database. I think people have managed to set up a purely remote database, but I'm not sure how that works (or how robust it would be if there were two versions of DS running on different machines, both accessing it - two on the same machine is OK, so it might work).

ramasters

Richard Haseltine said:

Keeping the databases in sync is a problem that i think everyone with a shared content folder has hit. You can't just sync the ContentCluster folder as copying from/to it while DS (or DIM or Carrara) is open would be likely to corrupt the database. I think people have managed to set up a purely remote database, but I'm not sure how that works (or how robust it would be if there were two versions of DS running on different machines, both accessing it - two on the same machine is OK, so it might work).

Yea, I've been considering setting up a separate SSD to my modem and using that instead, I just wasn't sure if there would be complications there.

Thank you!

andya_b341b7c5f5

If I understand what you are attempting, you have DS with the PostgresSQL database installed on both a PC and a laptop, and you are syncing both the DS content folder and the PostgreSQL 'cluster' directory to Dropbox.  You are installing DS content on the laptop, with the intention that it is then usable on the PC.  The DS content and the PostgreSQL folders are synced to the Dropbox cloud from the laptop hard drive, then synced by the PC from the Dropbox cloud to its hard drive.

PostgreSQL is more than capable of having many remote clients access one database server simultaneously.  This would be done by having one database server, with corresponding data 'cluster', and many clients send updates to the server, which applies them to the files in the 'cluster' directory.  In your set up, you appear to have two PostgreSQL servers that are only linked via the Dropbox syncing processes.  The PostgreSQL client on the laptop (DS) sends updates to the PostgreSQL server on the laptop, no problem there.  But the PostgreSQL server on the PC is having its 'cluster' updated independently by the syncing from Dropbox, while the server is still running.  This kind of thing does tend to 'upset' database servers, they often don't behave predictably if you tinker directly with their data files without telling them about it, or you should not be too surprised when they complain.  The DS content files don't 'live' in the PostgreSQL database, but smart content does.  Hence your DS content is available, but your smart content on the PC is unreliable. 

The standard way to keep two databases happily 'in sync' would be to set up replication, with one database (laptop in your case) as master and the other (PC) as slave.  In that scenario, you no longer need Dropbox in between, but you do need a network connection.  The master handles all data writes (from content installs), which are replicated to the slave, and the slave is read only.  This is not, however, a trivial setup.

Note also that the use case envisaged with DS is to have only a single client access the database from the same machine.  It's possible, though I obviously don't know, that PostgreSQL has been set up quite specifically for that use case by Daz, which would mean some reconfiguration is required for other use cases.