Collaborating in the Cloud - steadmanpilly1987

"IT's OK! I successful a copy of it."

Those words just about price Maine and my team up six months worth of hard work. Hopefully, my story and the lesson we learned bequeath prevent something confusable from happening to you.

How information technology Every Started

Working remotely isn't new for me. I've been doing it since the earlyish 2000s. Sure, the tools have changed, but the basic principle are the same:

You take a way to keep in touch with your team up.
You need a place to stash awa your shared files.

My up-to-date toolset includes Slack, Soar up, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Apps. There are a few others, but these are the ones I use every day.

Slack is how we all stay in touch; Soar upwards is what we use when we need to accept longer conversations; Dropbox and Google Drive is how we share our files; and Google Apps is where we collaborate.

For the most part, these tools work asymptomatic—we give same few technical issues, and we all understand how to use them. Or do we?

The short answer is: nope! As IT turns impossible, we were entirely missing something sorely open.

Acquisition How It Works, the Hard Way!

When I started using Google for collaborationism, I ne'er view more or less how it worked. Honestly, I didn't care.

Besides, Google Drive was simple! You throw some files into the cloud, much like you do with Dropbox, and you either apportion them with other people or gain access to them from your other devices.

And Google Docs? Wellspring, perdition, that was even easier! Create a file, and share it with whomever you choose; you didn't involve to think out about what system they were happening or if they had the proper software to view it—you just shared it, and it worked.

Simply how?

I'll progress to that, but before we go down the coney hole, lease's take a step back.

Google Drive vs Google Apps

Chances are, you read the dispute between Google Drive and Google Apps:

Google Motor is a swarm-supported entrepot religious service, where a free account will commence you 15 GB Charles Frederick Worth of storage.
Google Apps, look-alike Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides are all web-settled productivity apps—think Microsoft Office in your browser.

When you make a document, spreadsheet, operating theater presentation victimisation any unmatchable of the Google Apps, it's automatically stored on the Google Movement. You can as wel store new files on the Google Tug, like images and Microsoft Word docs.

In our case, we store a lot of Phylogenetic relation Designer files along with our Google Department of Commerce files. What I hateful to say is: our position is not at whol coordination compound.

A typic Google Drive/Google Docs scenario

At DayOfTheIndie.com we collaborate on a lot of different things. Things like game design documents, tutorials, art, and other game-related content.

To make collaboration easier, we use Google Take to store most of our files.

Note: Wherefore don't we store all of our files along Google Drive? Because some single file formats just don't lend themselves to being stored/joint on Google Drive. In our experience, Xcode projects are one such file types, as are Scrivener projects.

We also rely heavily on Google Docs. Almost everything we indite starts with a New > Google Docs > Incommunicative document command. One of the primary reasons? Real-time, multi-user coaction. In that respect's nothing like having a grouping of individuals, scattered around the world, working on the Lapplander document, at the same time, where everyone can see the changes as they're occurrent.

Only something bad happened! We lost nearly 6 months worth of our work.

Bed how your tools function

Now I'll admit, had we taken the metre to learn and understand how Google Docs worked, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble—but we didn't, and that's happening Pine Tree State!

But present's the thing: are you interpretation this clause right right away thinking you know how it works? IT's Okey if you are. Cardinal months ago, if I came across this article, I'd think the same thing. Heck, thither's a good chance I would have skipped reading it. And yet reading it would have been a Life Saver—emergency room, I mean a file saver.

How Google Docs works

Have you of all time peeked inside of a .gdoc single file? If not, now's a blast.

Hither's what it looks like (note: the document ID and netmail address were transformed for this example):

{"url": "https://drive.google.com/public?id=xxx", "doc_id": "xxx", "email": "youremailaddress@gmail.com"}

That's right! A Google Doctor file is nothing much a plain document with a reference yoke to the Google Doc register. Sadly, that tiny detail ended prepared causing my squad a lot of heartache.

You see, I thought Google Medico files (and each of the another Google App-related files) were more like Microsoft Word or Pages documents. IT never occurred to me that they were simple pointers. So when I moved our files outside of the Google drive and into local storehouse, I ready-made a terrible mistake.

Yeah, I get onto. That was an incredibly stupid move on my piece, but at to the lowest degree it taught me a valuable lesson: jazz how your tools mould.

An in-depth look at the problem

After few months of working together, my team decided it was time to clean up our drive. That meant active through with our file systems, re-organizing things, and removing files we no thirster needed.

Because we had much things we didn't want than those we did, we came up with a simple plan: to topically archive the new files and copy backward only the files we still utilised. Briary with a plan, I copied everything topically, deleted the files from Google Drive, emptied the trash, and copied back only the files we victimized.

Ah, a washed ticket! It felt great… that is, until I tried to open our Game Design Document. That's when it happened; I got the dreaded "404, file not set up, fault.

Atomic number 102 doubt you already figured out why: because the file no longer existed.

You attend, when I emptied the files from the Trash, the Google Docs were removed from Google, which meant the link to the files were now invalid.

Unnecessary to say, we were devastated. All of that work, foregone! Merely wish that. Just because we assumed the data was invulnerable and sound on a section hard drive.

The only thing safe were a bunch of solid-colored text files whose contents pointed to nullified Google Commerce documents. Oh joy!

How We Escaped Disaster and What You Can Hear From Our Experience

The good news is that we managed to recover 85% of our files, mostly because of dense luck.

After frantically stressful to recover our files without often success, I remembered that I hadn't yet had a chance to synchronize my iPad. And that's when it hit me! Maybe our files are still on that gimmick?

Not wanting to risk an self-loading sync, I reversed hit Wisconsin-fi and fired IT leading. Whew! The offline files were still in that location. I chop-chop traced the contents of all document and glued it into something else. When I was done, I switched the Badger State-fi hindmost on and, as I suspected would materialise, I watched my offline documents go away.

Using offline files isn't enough

Okey, before you start thinking that having Google Docs fix up for offline is sufficiency, it's not. Well, not if you want to wealthy person a copy of your papers live outside of Google. For that, there's only one way: you need to download it victimization one of their supported formats.

At this clock, Google supports the following formats:

Microsoft Word (.docx)
OpenDocument format ( .odt)
Rich Text Arrange ( .rtf)
PDF document (.pdf)
Plain textbook (.txt)
Web page (.hypertext markup language, zipped)
EPUB publishing (.epub)

To download the file, open it in Google Dr., click on File cabinet > Download as, and then pick the desired format.

That's it! In real time you can move it anywhere you want.

A Powerful Moral Worth Sharing

I won't lie. After this undergo, we seriously thoughtful ditching Google Docs and finding something else. But in the end, we realized that it was our want of knowledge that was at the inwardness of this problem; not Google.

Had we taken the time to learn and understand how our tools work, we could have avoided this painful experience. But hey, our loss is your gain, because at once ya get it on! ;]

Near the Author
Tam Coron is an independent creative vocation and the boniface of Roundabout: Fanciful Chaos. She's also the cobalt-founder of Day Of The Indie, the organizer in arrears Indie DevStock, and the founder of Just Pen Codification. Find out more at TammyCoron.com.

Source: https://blog.icons8.com/articles/collaborating-in-the-cloud/

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