[SteveB]

Hi,  Sorry if this has already been asked, I searched and didn't find anything.

I have a library of 100 pieces, and it is growing rapidly (I play in 3 groups and they are throwing new pieces at me regularly).

As a former IT guy I'm a fanatic about backups.  At the end of each day I want to back up all the annotations I made, and maybe a scan of a new song or two.  I have been using the "Sync Library" option to sync to my DropBox account with the "Update Folder" option selected.

The Sync Library function works very quickly and seems like a good option, but I have noticed that after renaming a song on my tablet, both the old and new version of the song exists in my DropBox folder.  I'm not sure what type of problem that may cause in the future.  I have experimented with the "Two-way Sync" option, but I noticed that if I delete a song from my tablet, it is restored during a 2 way sync.

I am assuming that if I would ever have to restore my database I would change the Sync option to "Update Device" to bring down all my songs and annotations to my tablet.

I prefer the Sync option because a full backup currently takes 7 minutes (I have slow internet) and of course will take longer as my library continues to grow.

Can someone advise me on the best way I should do end of the day backups ?

Thanks so much !!

[Geoff Bacon]

As another former IT guy, may I remind you that performing a sync is not a backup - it is just taking a copy (a backup is something that doesn't get overwritten). If something goes wrong with the sync, you don't have a backup - you potentially have two corrupted copies.

I use the companion to make backups of the tablet to the windows desktop - pretty quick.

Having said that, I only take a backup immediately before performing a manual update of MS - I can live with losing any recent annotations.
MS seems to be updated every couple of weeks if that helps - sometimes faster if there are bugs!

To me, the frequency of the backup should be "when you have made enough changes that you don't won't to lose them"

Geoff

[Zubersoft]

Geoff's recommendation is a good one - creating periodic backups is a really good idea, regardless of using the sync feature. 

As far as the two-way sync, that is expected behavior because I don't currently track the deletion of objects in the database. So when MobileSheets encounters something that one device has that the other doesn't, it assumes it is new and should be added. Addressing this is on my (very large) list of things to do.

Renaming a song is not inherently problematic. MobileSheets will do its best to try to figure out if a song was renamed, and if that is the reason for why it doesn't match up to what is in the cloud folder, but in the worst case, it just deletes the old song and creates the new. If files are being left behind in your sync folder, that's definitely not a great thing (as it's wasting your Dropbox storage space), but I don't think it will cause any issues for MobileSheets. That is something I will have to look into though if you are seeing that regularly.

I think you can continue to use the sync feature though for what you are doing.

Mike

[SteveB]

OK, thanks Mike

[otnt]

As a former IT guy I'm a fanatic about backups.  At the end of each day I want to back up all the annotations I made, and maybe a scan of a new song or two.  I have been using the "Sync Library" option to sync to my DropBox account with the "Update Folder" option selected.

I prefer the Sync option because a full backup currently takes 7 minutes (I have slow internet) and of course will take longer as my library continues to grow.

Can someone advise me on the best way I should do end of the day backups ?

Thanks so much !!

I'm also for a full backup.
Optimise your pdfs/files to make backing up faster:
- instead of taking pictures (having large file size) use PDFs produced in notation software (having very small size)
- dissect unnecessary pages from PDF file. Export pages you only need.

I've around 700 pieces and cloud backup takes seconds.

Perhaps Mike can introduce automatic full backups for people like you in the future.