Issues with OneDrive and InDesign files

[Toon61]

At our designstudio we are (forced to) using OneDrive as the cloud solution to store and maintain (mostly) InDesign files. Recently we had a project (an annual report) for a client wich has over 60 chapters/subchapters and a total of over 500 pages.

So, previously (when we where working on a MS Fileserver) we decided to split it into several InDesign documents: every chapter (including a TOC) and subchapter as seperate InDesign files. This worked great, because several team-members could work on a single (sub)chapter of the entire document without interfering someone else.

We collect all these seperate InDesign documents in a single InDesign book (a INDB file), create the separate TOC's and the general TOC wihout problems.

But with OneDrive we are forced to generate the complete book locally on one of the designers' Mac. Why, because OneDrive can't cope with the fast opening/reindexing of files and pagenumbers etc. This usually results in InDesign files with the user name appendend to some of these files ( chapter_3.1.2_Name_of_this_chapter_V3_current-user-name.indd ). As a result the InDesign Book file is not valid, and these renamed files do not correspond to the original file !!! Chapter 4.1 in this case could have content that corresponds to chapter 3.12.

It looks like OneDrive is not capable of fast opening and closing of InDesign when creating a book (*.indb) file.

This worries me a (**badwords**) lot!!!

We have also seen that changes to a single chapter document are not synced in realtime. Syncing appears to effectivivly go after 4 hours (WTF) or later (or not), so we had to check and do the changes again and again because we could  not rely on the changes (and updates in OneDrive) when one co-worker did these. But, as most of us are, we are on a time shedule.

This is so (**badwords**) counter-productive and in case of OneDrive, absolutely not reliable!

How can we solve this, and is it resolvable, or should we go for CC Cloud storage or iCloud storage?

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from cc desktop">

[BobLevine]

This is NOT exclusive to OneDrive; it's a known limitation for all cloud storage systems including iCloud. The proper way to avoid this is to make sure the folders in question are not included in the cloud only and are always available offline.

[Daz23706132g72n]

I wonder whether the rapidfire saving issue would also affect InCopy. When editing an inDesign file in InCopy, the text is stored in multiple icml/icma files, one for each text frame. If you push more text into a frame and some pushes to the next frame (usual stuff), InCopy moves the text from one supporting .icml document to the next, rapidly. I'll be trialling OneDrive soon in this situation so will be interesting to see if it copes, given what you've described about chapter edits in the book format!

[BobLevine]

Nothing's changed but I will offer this piece of advice in addition to making sure all files are available off line. Unless you're using a large work group do not use assignments. Have the InCopy users open the INDD files and check out the stories from there.

IME, with a fast internet connection, the InCopy lock files are generated almost instantaneously and unlike the InDesign lock files are honored by InDesign and InCopy.

[BobLevine]

One more thing. InDesign / InCopy will not move text from one ICML file to another. The ICML files contain stories. If the text frames are threaded  it'll work. If they're not, you'll wind up with overset text.