Locally Store All Files

[neljoshua]

In light of today's events (see post here), I believe it would be beneficial to allow users to locally store all Fusion files and data.  The data can still be backed up to the server, but is locally stored first.  This would prevent server outages from becoming catastrophic events for businesses, schools, and individuals.  If users did not want to locally store files (due to disk space or other reasons), they could elect not to in Fusion's preferences.  Or perhaps this could be a setting for each folder or project.

Manually, individually backing up files (a current Fusion capability) is not a reasonable solution to this problem.  Not only is it time-consuming and difficult to manage well, it does not currently work for designs that have XREFs.

I personally have no problem using the cloud for storage and computing (such as simulations).  There are some great things that Fusion allows because of this capability.  The lack of local storage as a backup, however, is an issue for me.

[roambotics_scott]

I’ve heard the same and it’s not just silly but utterly ridiculous. Box, Dropbox, iCloud Drive,‥ all implement cloud storage in a way that’s not just compatible with local storage but that is built on top of it.

There is zero technical reason this can’t be done. It’s entirely religious.

[cekuhnen]

@chrisdagher642

Well at least once a year the network issue blows up into AD face quite significantly and they used it over time to implement options

that should have been with the software from day one.

Files are locally stored if you use selective cashing. Why not have a selective cloud sync. As many state the requirement to use cloud

storage is a main reason why you cannot use Fusion with NDAs that do not allow you to use cloud.

Ah well ...

[roambotics_scott]

This always screens poor architectural choices compounded by bone headed obstinance.

The former is no big deal and completely excusable. We all make mistakes.

The latter, however, is (to be generous) just succumbing to the fallacy of sunk costs and re-doubling down on a bad bet.

At some point, somebody declared «F360 shalt be cloud based» and now come hell or high water it will not only be cloud enhanced but it’ll have the cloud in the critical path and nothing the users say and no matter how obvious it may become that it was a mistake will change your minds.

You need to save face - I get that. Don't walk it back. Just make it «cloud based» in the same sense Keynote is - cloud enhanced.

Don't even tell us you're doing it, but make it usable as a stand-alone product that gets way better with the cloud.

That should just be a no-brainer.

[planetzargon]

It looks like this idea has become one of the highest-voted ones in the history of Fusion, which is a good thing.

roambotics_scott, Fusion is almost there with the new offline "experience". All it really needs is a way of saving files locally, and allowing the user to add or remove those files within the project manager thingy.

Version management? Remains the same. But only for the cloud-based version, the local one will simply be the latest save.

Delete the local file outside of Fusion? The cloud one persists. Yay!

Delete a file within Fusion? Ask the user whether to delete the local one or only the cloud version.

Yada yada yada. So very little change required to the existing codebase, this functionality could probably be added as a plugin. 

[roambotics_scott]

Version management has nothing to do with it (at least not in terms of requirements; I expect their implementation is needlessly spaghettied to the cloud and back again)

I use Git every day. It does distributed,de-centralized version control. With that I have to manually push/pull and resolve conflicts, but Keynote and Pages and Numbers do that transparently and automatically.

For this you’d want something closer to the former than the latter which is why they built diff-merge (or, at least, a big part of why I suggested it years ago)

Doing that for CAD is harder, but not soooo much harder it can’t be done.

[LibertyMachine]

Just gonna post in this thread since the Cloud just went down. Felt it was worthy of a bump...

[Captain-DJ]

Sometimes Fusion360 is buggy if there is no internet connection. And i don´t want my data on an cloud server ! For backup yes, for working no ! This is the baddest think on Fusion 360 !

[mart.hough]

 Perhaps someone smarter than me can write a script add in that automagically exports a copy of the file to a local location. with each file version.. not a sync but a backup. so all versions are saved locally.. a first in first out rule could be configured to try and prevent the backups ballooning out and filling your local storage...

If that local location is a Dropbox folder than... wow... that makes a semi robust backup strategy.. two clouds and at least one local copy.

[stevendavies86]

I vote yes

[flkraemer]

+1 

Would love a solution for the Synology NAS package manager (or other NAS/Linux servers for that matter) which offers scheduled backups of everything.

... maybe including options like "convert to iges/step/PDFs for drawings"

Like google takeout.

[Anonymous]

My ISP connection is intermittently choking.  Painful!  Internet only access - exceedingly painful.

Also, I was recently requested to use Fusion360 for a beginners' class on design, and network access only will make it tenuous and painful if their WiFi isn't up to the task.

[samakar]

This is great. Our company has strict policy against cloud storage. I like to have an option that only processing happens in the cloud but all the storage is local. 

[Scoox]

Please can we have this asap?! I keep losing my work because I can't SAVE. Ctrl+S should not up-version, it should simply overwrite the local copy to create a save point, thus ensuring that any ongoing work is safe. Later, when the work is ready to be integrated into the project, it can be committed. There's no point committing all those tiny unimportant intermediate save points, which currently litter the project with countless versions named "User saved"...

[roambotics_scott]

It should absolutely not overwrite. It should save a delta locally and sync it to the repository

Losing data and work absolutely shouldn’t happen no matter what though. That is unacceptable

[Anonymous]

I wish it was more like Onedrive or Google drive. You have a folder which synchronizes with Fusion Cloud Storage.

So if I delete a file or folder it also is deleted from the cloud.

[roambotics_scott]

That’s basically how it should work.

Perfectly usable without a network connection, but synced and enhanced when one is available

[stevendavies86]

If Fusion 360 could use the A360 drive to keep online and offline files in sync. Then when the network does go down, you can still open, save and edit files locally. When the network comes back online then A360 can figure out what files are new, revised, etc.. 

This seems doable, but I am a CNC programmer, not a computer programmer. I would like to hear from one of the development team to understand what is possible and what is not.

[Scoox]

Actually, I was wrong and it does work as expected. What may have happened is that when I checked I had already hit Ctlr+S which of course resulted in the menu item being grayed out.

Going back to the main topic, users should have the option to save several versions when offline. Currently, offline save can only overwrite the latest version of a project, therefore the only thing that's achieved is to avert data loss should a crash be about to occur, and the price to pay is that once you hit Ctrl+S you cannot instantaneously jump back to the previous save point. What's missing here is the ability to create offline versions (or perhaps "sub-versions"), thus enabling users to create intermediate back-up points should they quickly wish to revert to an earlier state which is not necessarily worth committing: you've just spent half an hour working on a component that's not quite done yet, and you are about to explore various ways to model a specific part of it. In this case, we can use Undo or the timeline to backtrack, but it would be quicker and cleaner to just throw it all away and re-open the last saved offline sub-version. Maybe this is already possible?

[Anonymous]

+1 to this, and everything said a few posts above re:

Ctrl+S should not up-version, it should simply overwrite the local copy to create a save point, thus ensuring that any ongoing work is safe. Later, when the work is ready to be integrated into the project, it can be committed. There's no point committing all those tiny unimportant intermediate save points, which currently litter the project with countless versions named "User saved"...

I want the speed/security/control of saving *my* files on *my* storage device primarily. Sync'ing to the cloud for backup and sharing is all nice, but totally, totally secondary for me.

[Captain-DJ]

Status is ACCEPTED but how log will it take to integrate this ?

Im really waiting for this, i think many people too.

Any new information ?