Orbis in the Cloud

Orbis relies on being able to find thousands of files very quickly, and so it works a bit differently than other parts of Nota Bene. To use Orbis in the cloud, you need to give the home folder a common name which can refer to it across all systems. This shortcut name relies on the “SUBST” option on Windows, which allows creating/“mapping” a single letter “drive” name to a particular longer path. And although Macs do not use drive names the same way that Windows systems do outside of Orbis, in Orbis Macs use this same drive-designation structure when creating textbases.

To set this up, click File, File Options, Set File Sharing or respond to the popup that is displayed when you first invoke Orbis, either in its full form, or as a popup

The second of these lets you choose between various predefined options, offering names such as “S:” (for “shared”) or “N:” (for “Nota Bene”), or even others, based on Nota Bene’s determination of what drive letters are free on all of the systems sharing the Nota Bene home folder in the cloud. Alternatively, you can use the first option above to specify a drive/name of your own choice, as long as you make sure that that drive/name is not already in use on any of the systems on which you are running this shared Nota Bene (the drives/names already used by other computers sharing this same home folder are shown in the list at the top of the Set File Sharing dialog).

On Windows systems (Macs do not use drive designations, except in Orbis) this drive/name will show up in all the dialogs that show available drives/folders/files/locations on your computer, whether invoked from within Nota Bene, or independently (by some other program). In most cases, this alias name will be displayed after the built-in drives/names, since the listing of devices is often in alphabetical order (with the main drive usually being C:, and secondary drives D: or E:, etc.).

It’s important to note that setting up a short name for the longer, often different, folders does NOT create a copy of the files in that folder, but only gives you a different way of accessing the selfsame files. That means that any operation on — such as deleting! — a file in one of these (only seemingly different) locations will act on the file in the other, they being the very same file!

A file named “Hermeneutics in Gadamer and Frei” in that folder

This file would be accessed in different ways depending on whether you used the full path, or the alias:

Full path — you would open the C: drive, and then open each of those folders in sequence: USERS > JANE > DROPBOX > NOTA BENE > DOCUMENTS, where you would find your file

Cloud share/alias — you would open the S: drive, and then, immediately, DOCUMENTS (since S: is an alias for the longer C:\USERS\JANE\DROPBOX\NOTA BENE\ path, effectively replacing it)

1	Make sure the files to be included in the textbase are under a shared folder under the sync folder (so they can be accessed from various machines)

2	Create the textbase on one machine, choosing a folder (the recommended folder is Textbases) under the shared home folder as the location for the management files

3	When the dialog that lets you select files is displayed, choose the files you want to have included from the Shared icon/option under both the Nota Bene and the Cloud entry in the Favorites bar, NOT from the longer (physical) location of those files.

The above rules apply only to textbases (a) that you want to have shared and (b) that are user-defined textbases created by full Orbis.

Textbases created automatically by popup Orbis follow the rules you specify in the popup Orbis configuration menu. The Recent Files and Manuscript File options are always machine-specific (not synced in the cloud). Other textbases are synced or not, depending on how you configure the program (but this of course works only if the various data accessed by the textbase is saved in the cloud). Folder-specific textbases can either by synced in the cloud, or not, even if the other textbases are synced.