topic Re: Sharing File Geodatabases on Dropbox in Data Management Questions

Sharing File Geodatabases on Dropbox

MichaelMirro — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:47:46 GMT

Does anyone have any experience sharing file geodatabases on Dropbox? I have been experimenting with dropbox as a way of "networking" two offices. We have several communal projects, were we are required to share data.

The problem I am having, is that when one person opens an edit session in a file geodatabase, the other person can still open an edit session. Then both people end up editing the same feature class. Once saved, the first person who started the edit session gets their data saved in the feature class, and the second person ends up loosing their data. Dropbox actually creates its standard duplicate files for the second user. This works well with Word, or other simpler software, but with the complex nature of the file geodatabase, I would not know how to recover the data from the duplicate (copy) files.

Either way, my goal would be to get ArcGIS to recognize the lock files and editing locks so that the second person just can't edit. Right now we have to communicate and schedule editing.

Has anyone solved such a problem. Are there other online, dropbox like services, that work better for this?

Re: Sharing File Geodatabases on Dropbox

DanAllen — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 13:35:35 GMT

Was this ever answered? Like above, I have multiple clients with shared folders already setup on dropbox and would like to consider putting a file geodatabase in dropbox, (or google drive or Microsoft Onedrive) that could be collaboratively edited.

Has anyone tested this further and resolved the issue with lock files? Also when you save edits to a File GDB, does Dropbox sync the hundreds of random named files inside the GDB correctly, or does that corrupt it?

Thanks

Dan

Re: Sharing File Geodatabases on Dropbox

VitorFortunato — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 08:56:01 GMT

Probably it is just not possible to share a FGDB over some kind of cloud sharing service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc...). FGDBs were not made to be handled by these services. When you have a Dropbox folder in your PC, ArcMap will think that just you are editing the FGDB. The other person will have a totally different copy in his PC.

Check out this link:
database replication - Issues Using Dropbox to Sync File GeoDatabases - Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange