Google drive for Inventor file library?

[Anonymous]

My school district is changing its storage model. They are planning on giving each student a google drive and not a network drive. I am concerned that the students won't be able to save their assemblies with the part files correctly linked. I am also concerned that they won't be able to use a shared library of parts for their assemblies.

Has anyone done Inventor using only google storage for the libaries etc?

Thanks,

Pam

[JDMather]

You might also look into using A360 Drive or Autodesk 360 for this.

[Neil_Cross]

It isn't ideal but I guess this is where mass free storage is heading.

If Google Drive is anything like Dropbox/OneDrive/A360 etc it should be fine.  The students will save to a local folder which when edits or new files are found, it'll sync them up to the Google servers.  There is always going to be potential problems with this i.e. sync issues, conflicts etc but for non-production work it should be OK.

Regarding shared libraries, I've no idea how Google Drive works but they may be able to create a shared folder and assign email addresses to that share which is accessible to multiple people.  

[Anonymous]

I've used my google drive for this purpose for a while, and it works for the most part, but what I would suggest is pausing the sync while inventor is open.

Sometimes it creates an error when google drive is trying to access a file at the same time as inventor -- from time to time, inventor will read the file as "in use" and refuse to save over it, but "save as copy" says the original file in inaccessible and at that point the file is a dead end, you have to close and reopen from the last save point.

if google drive is paused while you're active in inventor, and after closing you resume and let it sync, it works fine -- but it makes for some frustrating moments if you forget to pause it.

it doesn't happen frequently or every time you save, but it happens enough to be a problem.