Sync projects with remote NAS

Question

This question might not belong here, but it has to do with studio setup, and I'd like to know what other studios are doing for a syncing solution.

I have a studio in town, which is about half an hour drive from my home. Obviously I do all the recording at the studio, however I would like to be able to continue editing and working on my projects at home. Here's my plan:

I bought a NAS (DLink DNS 320L), and I'd like to use it to synchronize my projects between my computers at the studio and home, kind of like how dropbox works. If I work on the project at the studio, it will sync to the NAS and update the project on my home computer (and vice versa). The NAS will be located at my home.

Is anyone currently doing anything like this with their own studio? What software are you using to keep your folders synchronized? Does anyone have a step by step guide for setting up something like this?

Note: I'm from a computer science background, so don't be afraid of technical jargon

Answer 1

I have a "recording" folder on my HomeComputer and a "recording" folder on my StudioComputer, and I wanted these working folders to stay in sync, similar to dropbox or google drive. The folders contain my Logic 9 projects, sample libraries, and small video projects. The solution I found is synchronization software called GoodSync, and it's working pretty well so far.

HomeComputer <-----> NAS <-----> StudioComputer

I set up a 2 way synchronization job between the HomeComputer and the NAS, and another 2 way synchronization job between the StudioComputer and the NAS (diagram above).

When I finish a recording session at the studio, I just run the job, and everything new/updated gets pushed to the NAS. I can now shut off my StudioComputer and go home.

If I want to work on that same session at home, I turn on my HomeComputer and run the job. Everything new/updated gets pulled from the NAS. When I finish working on the project at home, I run the job and everything gets pushed to the NAS again.

This means my most recent work is always on the NAS. I just pull from it, do the work, and push it back.

Pros:

• The nice thing about this setup is that I don’t have to have both computers powered on to run the sync. Both computers push and pull from the same repository (the NAS) which I always keep online and available.
• Data is duplicated across 3 devices in separate locations, which minimizes the risk of losing everything.
• I can access my NAS from anywhere in the world. For example, I can go to someone else's studio, pull from my NAS, record a bunch of stuff and push it back.
• I had to buy two licenses to run GoodSync on both computers. Although the software costs $40.00, every additional license is only $10.00

Cons:

• The downside is that I have to remember to run the synchronize every time I begin a session and after I finish. I suppose I could set up scripts to make this happen on start-up and shut-down though. Working on a project without synchronizing first likely means I'll have conflicts when I try synchronizing later. This hasn't happened to me yet, but if it did I would probably overwrite the HomeComputer since my recorded studio tracks are usually more important than any editing I've done at home.
• If the internet is slow at either location, it makes the synchronize process very time consuming, especially if you have several GB of new recordings. If both computers are on the same local network though (for example: maybe your second computer is a laptop that you can take home and run the sync), the process is pretty quick.

This system works really well for a single user. If you had multiple people working on the same project from different locations though, you may have to set things up differently since merging conflicts doesn't really work for audio the same way it would for a computer coding project.