Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: Tim Hall on 23 October, 2018, 11:31:48 am
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Situation: Two people who need to see the same set of word and excel files. Until now the two have worked independently, creating their own files, stored on each person's external HDD. Of the files on the HDD some/many exist on both whilst others exist only on one or the other.
Person A has copied his files into a One Drive folder and shared them with person B. Person B wants to compare the contents of his external HDD with the One Drive folder and copy/move those files on his HDD which don't exist in the One drive folder.
What does The Panel suggest as an easy way to do this? The laptops used by A & B are a bit buttoned down, with no admin rights, although the nice people at tech support can help with installing new programs if needed.
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You don't say how secure the file has to be?
The simplest option is to work online on a single file, which can be downloaded as required for offline use. I'd go with Google Drive, personally, with google Sheets online. Failing that, if you want web service on a secure basis you end up paying to someone like box.com.
But, the simplest way if you don't want to work online is probably just to use FreeFileSynch (https://freefilesync.org/) to synch two local files, one in the One Drive folder and one in the doc folder, Dropbox is another alternative.
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Sharepoint is designed to do stuff like this, it stops one person editing a file whilst another is so the edits dont clash. Dont ask me how though as I just use what the company sets up. Microsoft web based stuff isnt my bag.
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Sounds like a nightmare scenario - Microsoft tools, no version control, no clear policies
Do the copying manually and accept that frequent mistakes will occur
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Well, once they're on One Drive, collaboration just works through some kind of magic. Never had an issue even with multiple people working on the same document, other than obviously people removing the changes you made in real time...
However, I think the problem was how to compare what's currently local with what's on OD.
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Well, once they're on One Drive, collaboration just works through some kind of magic. Never had an issue even with multiple people working on the same document, other than obviously people removing the changes you made in real time...
However, I think the problem was how to compare what's currently local with what's on OD.
The Tidy Haired Thought Leader has it. How do I compare what's on my local drive with what's on One Drive and copy onto One Drive that which isn't there yet? It'll be maybe a hundred files.
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Person A has copied his files into a One Drive folder and shared them with person B. Person B wants to compare the contents of his external HDD with the One Drive folder and copy/move those files on his HDD which don't exist in the One drive folder.
Surely you can just drag them on and click “No” on the “Do you want to overwrite files wiht the same name?” dialog that pops up?
(I haven’t used Windows in a very long time, but I assume it still has one of those dialogs)
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Well, once they're on One Drive, collaboration just works through some kind of magic. Never had an issue even with multiple people working on the same document, other than obviously people removing the changes you made in real time...
However, I think the problem was how to compare what's currently local with what's on OD.
The Tidy Haired Thought Leader has it. How do I compare what's on my local drive with what's on One Drive and copy onto One Drive that which isn't there yet? It'll be maybe a hundred files.
Assuming (??) your local One Drive folder is synching with the online copy (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/choose-which-onedrive-folders-to-sync-to-your-computer-98b8b011-8b94-419b-aa95-a14ff2415e85), FreeFileSynch (linked above) will do the job of synching files intelligently according to whatever rules you want to set.
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I've got a NextCloud setup for exactly this kind of thing. It does dropbox style sync as well as, with either Collabora or "The Only Office" plugins, allows in-browser editing of files.
The only trouble is, you need an instance to run it on and the Collabora/The Only Office plugins actually need a server instance of their own. I am using Collabora in a docker container and nginx reverse proxy - bit fiddly to set-up but well worth while.
There are companies out there offering hosted NextCloud instances for minimal cost.