Storyline 360 Versioning on Google Drive for Desktop
Apr 30, 2024
Hello!
I have recently encountered a strange behavior with Storyline that I am unsure how to remedy, or why it is occuring. I am wondering if anyone has encountered this before.
So, my team uses Google Drive for desktop. I tried to open a SL360 file from our shared drive. The file opens perfectly file, but when I go to save the file it issues an error message that the file is already part of another process. The interesting part is that the file it is referencing is NOT the current file, but another file with an appended file name. So the workflow is:
Open "Saving Test" file using Google Drive for Desktop.
Make Edits.
Click Save.
Error "The process cannot access the file 'G:\Shared drives\XX\Saving Test2.story' because it is being used by another process."
Options: SaveAs...or Cancel
So Storyline--or Google--is creating this appended version and blocking the Save function. This behavior occurs with additional steps when trying to continue the process using Save As. You can get to a point where you can overwrite the original file with the same name, but it creates and keeps the appended version as well. Not great for version control :P
My question: Does anyone have a good workflow using Google drive for desktop and Storyline 360? Are there any easy workarounds to this behavior?
Storyline 360 BuildVersion: 3.86.32080.0
5 Replies
Actually, I think it is Windows that is appending the 2 to the file name.
Saving a SL file is a VERY complicated function, and any little anomaly in network latency or transmission can bargle the whole file. Best practice is to download the file from Drive to local drive, work on it, save locally, then upload to Drive. SL does not allow concurrent usage of the file, so you don’t lose any collaboration, but you do gain reliability.
How far does the concurrent use reach? If two developers download the same file and attempt to work on it with two different machines, will it alert both of them?
I don’t know if Drive will alert them, but SL will not, nor does SL allow concurrent use or downloading. Whoever saves last overwrites whatever is there.
The recommendation is not to work on shared drives, if you are working in teams it is probably better to use something like Git where files are checked in and out.
Storyline and shared folder is a long, very unpleasant story - many authors have lost their work in the past
the problem has existed for more than 10 years (since SL 2)