Version 3 on OneDrive

Analysis Version 3
#1

I switched recently from 2.4 to 3.2 and I noticed that I cannot start version 3 projects stored on OneDrive. At least I always get error messages. Things are fine on DropBox, so I have a temporary solution. However, it would be nice to be able to fully use version 3 also on OneDrive as that is integrated in my organisations IT setup and useful to share access with colleagues etc.
One additional observation: There does not seem to be any problem that the spectra used in the project are on OneDrive. The problem seems to relate exclusively to the project folder.
Has this happened to someone else? Any suggestion is most welcome!

thanks,
mark

#2

Hi Mark,

yes, we do very much recommend that you keep you project folder on the same hard drive as the Analysis installation. The reason is that the program very frequently reads from and writes to the project and if the network connection breaks you could easily end up with your project getting into an invalid tangled state. Spectra, by comparison are read and then buffered, so it doesn’t matter so much if they are somewhere on the network.

I’m surprised (but glad) that you didn’t end up in a mess with your V2 projects as these had the same vulnerability (V3 has inherited this from V2).

I suspect the actual issue with opening the project could be down to a recent fix. We’ve had a lot of problems with people using non-standard characters in their filenames and paths which end up getting mangled. So we have become a bit more strict on making sure that you can’t use paths for your project that are likely to cause problems. So in your case it may be down to that. Does your OneDrive path contain non-standard characters? I think what we recommend is the following:

Please only use alphanumeric characters (no accents or other diacritics), underscores (_), dashes (-), square/round brackets ()[] and spaces in your file path and project name.

Vicky

#3

Hi Vicky,

Thank you very much for your feedback!

The way OneDrive is incorporated into MacOS leads to a name that is indeed utterly incompatible with your rules: OneDrive - King’s College London
There are spaces and special characters galore!

The problem is that I have no say about how OneDrive is called. I would happily change it also because all the spaces don’t go well with command line activities in other (mostly academic) software. But so far I have not figured out how.

On the other hand, I have now organised most of my data on cloud drives, mostly OneDrive, also for easier access from other devices/places (maybe a result of the pandemic…) and to share with colleagues. I had indeed the issue that you have described but with help from you or your colleagues it was possible to fix those issues. But it is pretty rare and so far the benefits of the delocalised arrangement outweigh the downsides.

I think for the time being I shall create a small outpost for version 3 project files on DropBox which should not cause too much disorder.

All the best,

mark

#4

Hi Mark,

yes it looks as though the apostrophe is the main culprit. As you say, lots of older academic software has these sorts of limitations. You would have thought that KCL’s IT department might have thought of this and called it “OneDriveKCL” or at the very least “OneDrive - KCL”.

The frustrating thing for us is that much of the V3 code is fine with a wider range of characters, but there are still parts that rely on older code which falls over in this situation. I’m not quite sure what our chances are of being able to eliminate those elements.

So I’m sorry you’re having to find a workaround, but glad that you have found something that works for you.

Best wishes,
Vicky

#5

Hi Mark,

Have you tried making a shortcut (on Windows) or soft link (on MacOS/LINUX) to your OneDrive folder/directory without the special characters? It may not work if our software resolves the link to the proper path, but worth a quick try.

Brian