Team projects - using Cloud platform (Synology Drive) causes multiple reuploads and reconforms of media

Mac, latest version 26.5.0

Working on Team projects, media is shared via a Synology NAS, project media is shared over Synology Drive (via OSX File Provider)

Originally this workflow with standard projects worked reasonably well although between machines when saved caused reconforming of all assets when switching between the local and remote machines.

Worse than that, somewhere along the line an update caused all MP4 files to be ‘touched’, e.g. modified date changed which forced the Synology Drive client to reupload all the media every time it was re-opened.

This has been partly resolved by moving to Team Projects. Here the Media itself isn’t ‘touched’ when moving between machines.

However upon export from Media Encoder, all the Media assets in the sequence are now ‘retouched’ and now are forced to reupload, even though nothing has changed to them. I understand that XMP metadata does get embedded and that can cause the ‘change’ but I have (from what I can gather) been disabled where I can fine, e.g. Write XMP ID on Import.

Worse than that, now that the files have been changed they are now reconformed, such that over the course of the project massive numbers of conform files are created.

All caches ,scratch and conform files are set to be stored locally.

To try and mitigate this I can set all Media to be read-only at the system level but this doesn’t help our workflow. I guess I could export within Premiere itself which may prevent this issue, I’m guessing that through Media Encoder a temporary non Team project is created which acts as previously mentioned, causing all the MP4 files to be amended.

Any suggestions appreciated, some of these projects are 100Gb in size - despite having a 1Gb fibre connection over VPN to the remote NAS this problem causes delays of several hours to my workflow.