We have been working with KiCad 5.1 in our non profit modell railway club.
We have had 3 computers and a common library connected with Dropbox. We normally only work with 1 computer at time, so no work will be overwritten by someone.
Now we are working with migration to v. 7 and it seems to work.
However only 1 computer (mine) seems to save backups.
Saving a file on another computer gives error messages:
List item
5:18:13 PM: File ‘C:\Users\ÄGARE\Alcatraz Dropbox\TågCentralen Ljungby Järnvägsförening\TågCentralen\Lilla Småland\Ritningar\Elritningar\Elkonstruktion\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-backups\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-2023-10-08_210914.zip’ couldn’t be removed (error 3: Det går inte att hitta sökvägen.)
5:18:13 PM: File ‘C:\Users\ÄGARE\Alcatraz Dropbox\TågCentralen Ljungby Järnvägsförening\TågCentralen\Lilla Småland\Ritningar\Elritningar\Elkonstruktion\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-backups\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-2023-10-08_211541.zip’ couldn’t be removed (error 3: Det går inte att hitta sökvägen.)
5:18:13 PM: File ‘C:\Users\ÄGARE\Alcatraz Dropbox\TågCentralen Ljungby Järnvägsförening\TågCentralen\Lilla Småland\Ritningar\Elritningar\Elkonstruktion\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-backups\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-2023-10-08_220502.zip’ couldn’t be removed (error 3: Det går inte att hitta sökvägen.)
5:18:13 PM: File ‘C:\Users\ÄGARE\Alcatraz Dropbox\TågCentralen Ljungby Järnvägsförening\TågCentralen\Lilla Småland\Ritningar\Elritningar\Elkonstruktion\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-backups\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-2023-10-09_170609.zip’ couldn’t be removed (error 3: Det går inte att hitta sökvägen.)
5:18:13 PM: can’t open file ‘C:\Users\ÄGARE\Alcatraz Dropbox\TågCentralen Ljungby Järnvägsförening\TågCentralen\Lilla Småland\Ritningar\Elritningar\Elkonstruktion\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-backups\Åsen-Unnen Elsystem Specialeffekter-2023-10-09_171813.zip’ (error 3: Det går inte att hitta sökvägen.)
(Error 3 = can not find path)
Projects and symbols seems to be uptodate and synced between computers with Dropbox, as it did before.
The two computers have their own settings. See attachments.
My PC:
Cloud service shared folders have been problematic with KiCad. In any case I recommend using a versioning system (e.g. git: github or gitlab) although I understand it may be too much work to learn it if you (3 persons or more?) haven’t used it before. But it works and you get both versioning (no need for versioned backup saves) and external backup (no need for local backups) for free.
On the other hand, the path+filename seems to be very long. It’s idiotic if a modern system chokes on that, but who knows? Have you tried a shorter path?
You still need a proper backup. A backup where a malware on your PC can not write to. Keeping the versions history of files is not the same as a backup.
And backups need to be on a different drive, on a different machine, preferable in a different room in a different building.
Think about when you need a backup:
Someone accidentally deleted it.
Malware delets or encrypts your files.
Your Drive doesn’t work anymore
Your RAID manager crashes and overwrites the disk with crap.
A thief steels your equipment.
A fire, flood, earthquake or something like that happens.
…
Depending on what you are, a home user, small business or large business, you may accept that you loose your data in some of this cases. If you are a home user, after a flood the lost data is the least of your worries, if you are a business, your data maybe worth more than the building.
I’m not sure how I should understand the rest of your post with regards to a modern distributed VCS. Having a git repository in a service (in the internet, in cloud) pretty much keeps the repository safe in almost all situations. The only possibility for it to be corrupted is that the malware connects to the service using your account and alters the repository there. Even then, if one of the local machines would be compromised, you would have the repository in two other machines. It doesn’t work like with network shares where one user can just suddenly delete or alter files for all users.
But a VCS, like git, doesn’t imply or require any internet (service). It doesn’t even imply more than one computer. You can use git one a local machine only.
And a git server for your project means a server you can write to. You need to make sure your server makes regular backups to a place where it can not be overwritten by maleware. Maybe swap multiple backup HDDs so in case one is affected by malware, you can restore the data from the HDD connected before that. And for many companies, uploading stuff to the internet is not acceptable. I think the most likely scenario is that you have your own git server not on the internet. That is different for open source, but there is a lot of software that isn’t open source.
All the time I was thinking about, and actually mentioned, services like github and gitlab. I don’t see much sense in administering your own server unless you’re dedicated or paid to or something like that. It’s very easy to create and use projects in those services. I think the most complicated part is setting up the connection between the local machine/project and the remote service using your account. With KiCad you don’t even need to learn any complex operations like merging, although it’s important to avoid overlapping changes to files.
Then you have to account for the risk they may no longer provide that service in the future. Or they convert it to their own VCS that isn’t backward compatible with git. Or they delete your repository because it goes against some of their guidelines. Look at what happened with Eagle as Autodesk shoot the bird. Eagle users where wise when they kept there Eagle 7.7 (Last pre-Autodesk release) installers backed up and didn’t relay on “I can always download the installer”.
And again, this is not a place malware can not write to. If the keys are on your PC, it is not out of the question that a malware accesses GitLab and GitHub with the keys found on your PC and deletes or overwrites this changes. So this is not a proper backup.
You can create a simple, about 10-20 line long, bash scripts that searches of all git repositories on your PC, sets all branches and tags to the root commit and pushes this changes forcefully.
It is not hard. Some NAS devices have built in functionally for it.
You or your company may decide it is not worth to eliminate that risk and you can live with that possibility. But please, don’t advice people that using git or a service like GitLab or GitHub eliminates the need for a proper backup. It may does in some use cases but IMHO it doesn’t do it in most use cases.
When multiple people working a git repository, they usually all have a local copy of the git repository, but it’s not good advice to trust on that. If you have a group of people, such as this railway club, then I suggest you set up some strategy to maintain and update offline backups and have at least two of the club members check each other whether the backups actually work.
Personally I don’t trust cloud services at all. I may use them as a convenience to transfer or share some files, but not as the (sole) backup.
Thank you all for help.
I had to enable the long file name path in Windows.
As you mention we do not have time and competence to work with git hub, neither for kicad nor arduino code versioning.
Huw ever If it was easy maybe that could be a way. But we are not IT specialist =)
