Cloud Storage

When installing Nota Bene, you can choose the location of the Nota Bene “home” folder. The home folder is the place where your configuration settings and all of your data — regular files and Ibidem and Archiva databases, along with the files that manage Orbis textbases — is saved. I can be:

The program itself — the various modules that mange all the research and writing functions — should always be installed on a local drive.

Orbis relies of being able to find thousands of files very quickly, and so cloud storage works a bit differently than other parts of Nota Bene. See Orbis in the Cloud.

Before you can use Nota Bene in the cloud, you need to set up/install a separate cloud-synchronization program, such as iCloud, OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, or some other similar program. Once set up, the precise way the sync program works depends on the particular program you are using; any general questions about how your program operates thus need to be addressed to the developers of the system you are using.

•	They create a specific synchronization folder, usually under your user folder on your computer (e.g., \users\You), on each of the local computers that run this cloud software

•	Versions of all the files that you want to share (under this folder) are physically present in that folder on each machine running the same sync software (thus duplicating the shared files on all systems)

•	When changes are made on any of these local machines, the sync software — accessing “the cloud” via an internet connection — tries to add those same changes to all other versions of the file on all the other local machines that are running that same sync software

This is very convenient — it lets you access the same files, the same databases, the same custom settings — on all the machines that are linked together in this way, without you needing to manually keep them in sync. At the same time, there are some potential dangers of trusting everything to the cloud, as described at the end of this section.

When installing Nota Bene in the cloud, the default option is to create a separate Nota Bene subfolder under the main cloud folder, to keep all Nota Bene related files (and the various subfolders it uses) together, separate from other the data of other programs that might similarly use the same base cloud folder

And then, underneath that folder, are various other folders, such as Settings, Documents, Databases (for Ibidem databases), Textbases (for Orbis textbase management files), each of which can have subfolders of their own

The actual “pathway” to this Nota Bene folder on the different machines that use it may be different:

This means that the actual full path to the various files in the subfolders under the Nota Bene home folder may be different, depending on which computer you are working on. This is true whether you are writing inside Nota Bene, or looking at the folder and file structure using the operating system’s file-management software (e.g., File Explorer on Windows, or Finder on the Mac) or any other software.

Note that while these different pathways are likely if you work with both Windows and Mac systems, if you have multiple computers of the same type, the paths may be identical on the different systems as long as your user folders are named identically.

Either way, it’s easy to see what the actual physical location of the Nota Bene home folder is on all the machines that share a home by going to File, File Options, Set File Sharing.

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When you open the file on one system, the path of that file on that system may be displayed at various places, including in the title bar at the top of Nota Bene, in the Document Dialog Bar (Alt+D), in the popups that are displayed if you hover over — or right click in — the document header shown in the Tab Workspace, or — depending on whether you have chosen to display the full path under Tools, Preferences, Window and Filename Options — in the File or Window drop-down menus

•	This means that what seems to be the same file (remember, behind the scenes there are actually distinct versions on each system) may display a different location, in all the areas described above, when opened on different machines

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In some cases, to avoid confusion, Nota Bene will display something like “[Home]” instead of the actual paths, thus replacing the part that differs between machines with a term that applies universally to all the various computers using that shared folder (you can see the different actual home locations on all the computers that share this home by going to File, File Options, Set

•	Despite these discrete, machine-specific paths, Nota Bene always knows where to find the relevant file, based on the computer that is trying to access that file, database, etc.

While most Nota Bene files can be shared in the cloud, there are a few exceptions:

•	The files that contain machine-specific data (screen size, program placement, available printer drivers, etc.) are stored in the cloud, but their contents differ for each computer

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While autosave files can also be saved in a folder in the Cloud (during installation, an Autosave folder is created under the main Nota Bene home folder), we recommend changing this (under Tools, Preferences, Autosave) so that these important backup files are saved on a local machine, for the reason noted under the second point in the next section

•	Most recently used file lists — the list of most recently opened files (under the File drop-down list, or as saved in the Document Dialog Bar (Alt+D) — is shared between systems. But there are a few things to note:

•	As noted above, Nota Bene can automatically find files under the shared cloud folder even though the paths to those files may be different on different machines

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However, if you open a file that is only present on a local machine (that is, that is not under the shared folder), its name will be saved to the list, but if you then click on that file in the shared list on a different machine, it will tell you that that file is not found (it’s on another other computer, not the current one)

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Normally, Nota Bene updates the list of recently opened files only upon exiting the program. If you would instead like the shared file list to be updated in real time, so you can see the changes the next time a shared list is displayed on another computer, select this option from File, File Options, Set File Sharing

As noted above, all cloud programs offer significant benefits, but two things are worth noting:

As their names suggest, these programs involve “syncing” of files — that is, they attempt to keep what are actually separate copies of all the files synchronized, so that changes made on one system to the files local to that system are automatically added to the versions of those files (also distinct copies) on other machines. These programs are increasingly sophisticated, but by the nature of things they cannot guarantee perfect synchronization — if the same file is changed, at the same place, at the near same time, it might be difficult for the synchronizing program to know how to make a single version out of those two similar copies. All syncing software, of course, provides ways to handle this, usually by creating additional copies and inviting you to do the final synchronizing. (The only way to avoid such conflicts is for there to only ever be a single version of each file, stored in the cloud, and not accessible to you unless you have on-line access when you need to access the file. Beyond that, when you have a single version, the software managing that version needs to prevent simultaneous access to the portions of the file being edited.) While these possible conflicts shouldn’t deter you from saving Nota Bene data in the cloud, but you should at least be aware of and understand possible issues.

The other thing worth knowing about syncing software is that it is not meant as a safety/backup option. Indeed, it’s not unfair to say that at least initially relying on synced files even facilitates loss of data, precisely because the syncing software reproduces that data loss to other files on other computers sharing the synced files. Let’s say, for example, that you deleted a few pages from a file, thinking you really didn’t need that text, and when you changed your mind later you told yourself that fortunately you could retrieve it from your other machine. And the reality is that, in the simplest sense, you cannot — the version of the other machine would have been automatically updated by the syncing software, so when you opened the file there, the data would still be missing. That said, depending on the syncing software, there are various mechanisms to avoid this, and almost all of them provide access to earlier versions, in most cases saving them on their servers for up to a month. But it’s important that you not have a false sense of security about what syncing software does to preserve your data. In any case, it’s no substitute for having a reliable backup system. (This is not the point right now, but in most of these cases Nota Bene’s various autosave/auto backup functions give you more security than any cloud system, although even here those backups need to be saved onto independent physical hardware devices to protect from failure of the local storage device.)