I have had a Dropbox account for several weeks. Primarily got this account to share and save Dorico files. Tried to use the Dropbox forum to find out what to do about this issue, but the bot couldn’t help me. Dorico / Dropbox users, can you help? Thanks to any and all contributors.
A quick Google suggests two likely possibilities (but there may be plenty of less likely possibilities):
- Do any of your file names or folders include non-alphanumeric characters? Any accents? Any arrows or pictograms or whatever?
- Do any of your file names or folders contain leading or trailing spaces, e.g. \folder \my folder\ file.dorico rather than \folder\my folder\file.dorico?
If either of these is a “yes”, try fixing those first.
For what it’s worth, I’ve stored Dorico projects in Dropbox - hundreds of them - for the better part of five years. Really the only problem I’ve ever run into, across multiple devices and operating systems (including Windows) is situations where someone else on a shared folder has sync problems. Once their device gets back online and tries to sync, if files at either end have changed you can get duplicate files labelled as conflicting.
Leo, thank you so much for responding. I think it’s a problem I have with understanding how Dorico names files. I’ve been trying to sort it out. Please bear with me here –
When I open Project Info and put in a title, that is NOT the title that it saves as for me. I am really confused—
for example this is a project file for a song called The Sun and Moon
this is how it saves: 2021-04-23 12-33-56_THE SUN AND MOON.dorico
If you would explain how to create the name for a Dorico file and where to create it, it would help.
Thanks so much!
Lily
That looks to me like the backup file that was automatically generated for a file that had manually been saved as THE SUN AND MOON.dorico.
First things first:
If you go to Dorico Preferences (Cmd-comma) > General > Files, what’s the “Project backup folder” set to? On my Mac, it’s /Users/Leo/Documents/Dorico Projects/Backup Projects (though I can’t actually make out the first chunk of that path).
I suspect your “Project backup folder” and your “Default project folder” (above in the dialog) are set to the same thing, and they really shouldn’t be. The “Project backup folder” is, by default, inside the “Default project folder”.
To the best of my knowledge, there’s no automatic link between naming a project in Project Info and what that project is saved as. When you attempt to close a project (or Dorico itself), or when you go File > Save for the first time or File > Save As…, Dorico brings up the “Default project folder” and typically just puts “Untitled Project 1” in the filename field (or Untitled Project 2 if it’s the second project you’ve started within that Dorico session). It’s then up to you to replace that with something more useful before clicking Save at the bottom of the dialog. You can also navigate to a different folder (e.g. your Dropbox folder or a folder contained within Dropbox) and save there, if you like.
Beyond that, the expectation is that you’ll subsequently open and edit the file from the same place you initially manually saved it, e.g. not from the Project Backup folder. Dorico will continue saving backups behind the scenes, nicely dated and numbered, but they’re designed to be used in emergencies rather than day-to-day.
Leo, thanks so much for your reply — wow — I always have a hard time because my programmer mind is set in some other planetary configuration — like assuming that the purpose for Project Info was to easily keep track of files. Hah! Thank you for taking the time to explain the complexities of the procedure.
You are appreciated!