This may be beyond the scope of Media Center, but I figured I would ask. I have read the Library Server wiki post and a number of Interact posts, but haven't found an answer to my scenario.
I have MC running on a 7x24 desktop and two laptops and would like all of them to have the same library and media. The desktop is used to record TV and stream music to the house. All of the "day-to-day" work such as viewing images, syncing to iTunes, tagging, playlists, etc is done by the laptops.
Using a Library Server is the correct solution, but I don't think it will work for me. I need for MC to function on the laptops even when they do not have a live network connection. From what I have seen, the Library Server client will not open if it can't communicate with the Library Server. I could clone the server library and use a local copy on the laptops when offline, but that does not meet my needs because of the need to have updates flow back to the server.
I use Dropbox Pro to sync my 50K+ media files across the devices and it is working great. No matter the device (or user), the file path remains the same (C:\Dropbox\). Currently, each device has its own MC library and I am using MPL exports and imports to try to keep them in sync. I store all three libraries in Dropbox as well.
I realize that I can use a single MC library in Dropbox instead of three separate ones. The challenge is that the library can only be opened on one device at a time. If you open the same library on multiple devices at once, then files are locked and the cloud synchronization gets messed up. Any tags, playlist or other changes are lost. There are situations where my wife and I will "divide and conquer" tagging a few hundred vacation photos at once as well as other reasons why we would be doing different things at the same time. For the vacation photo example, she and I would split the list of photos in half, update the tags, and then use MPL files to propagate the changes to the other person's library. It works, but is error prone and cumbersome.
One solution would be for the library sync to the library server to occur via the cloud service instead of the network. Of course, this would mean that MC would have to be able to handle sync conflicts when it detects that two devices made changes to the same assets while being offline.
Any ideas about how to accomplish this? Can I have my cake and eat it too?
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Topic: Can I perform a Library Sync via a cloud service? (Read 1586 times)