Realm Works & NAS
 

Hello there!

Iam planning to buy a NAS system, due to the increasing need to backup my data (data, videos, photos, rpg stuff ecetera) locally and to distribute the data on my various devices in the network. Since I want to be secured for the next decades ( :) ) I am planning to buy a DS416 NAS system. (Another reason is that I don't want to trust my personal data to some external cloud service)

Now, what does this have to do with Realm Works?

Currently the realm works folders are stored on a local drive - and I think officially RW does not support network drives. One reason seems to be that the database is per "computer" and would need to be imported.

I work with RW on two devices (desktop and laptop) therefore I will require the export/import step on each system, once the cloud subscription expires.

Therefore I wanted to ask: Is somebody using RW and a NAS system? If so, what is your use case and what limitations would occur? Does it work with a single device?

Would it be possible if just one computer stores the database on the NAS (e.g. the desktop) and when I use the laptop, I would "import" data to the local harddrive from the NAS?

Cheers and thanks for your thoughts!

I originally read the thread title as "Realm Works & NSA". I'm kinda disappointed that this has nothing to do with a government agency stealing our campaign secrets. . . .

roflmao!! :d

My understanding is that RealmWorks is using the internal Windows paths for "Program Data" and "AppData" (for your individual user profile). The version of Windows that you are using will greatly affect this.. Windows 10 puts the user data on the boot drive (typically C) and resists efforts to move that. Using a symbolic link to identify another location is possible, but there is always the risk that something in a Windows update will break that.

In that sense, the mobility from machine to machine of the data is limited to Export/Import or synchronizing via the cloud service - on a practical level. As I said, there may be a trick or two you can use, but any such efforts are usually a) unsupported and b) at risk of unexpected failure due to changes in the underlying OS.

I recently purchased a WD MyCloud Mirror device. Probably not a direct NAS, but I used WDSync to keep a constant copy of "My Documents" backed up to the device.

With a 1.5GB realm file it does take quite a while to copy the realm file from my PC to the MyCloud device. Actually, at the moment, it is copying over the backups which are created in "My Documents\Realm Works" (but not the "Master.realm" stored under %AppData".)

I could easily set up the %AppData% on each machine to be synced to the MyCloud device, but I prefer having separate files synced from the cloud.

You could certainly use the NAS as a transfer medium between the two devices - just follow the existing procedure for manual backup/restore.

Each computer that Realm Works runs on needs a unique identifier for proper operation. This identifier is stored in the database. So if you copy the database around without doing a backup/restore or (worse) share a single database file between to machines through a NAS, each time you start up on a different machine, it has to contact our servers for a new identifier. So please do not do either of those things.

Reasons I never even dreamed of putting RW on my NAS drive include...

This talk of storage is giving me nightmares...

!!! Noo not the 3PAR !!!

hrm 3par might be not be the most cost-efficient solution for me :D I also don't want to get nightmares when I see the prices :D

I don't mind, eventually, paying LWD for cloud storage but would like some more flexibility in local storage options.

For instance I was looking at a windows tablet that has a SSD that is just big enough for Win 10. Which really isn't a problem for most apps as it has an SD card slot and a USB 3.0 slot both of which look like drives to the OS. But %appdata% would want to be on the SSD and while I could redirect that it wouldn't be reliable.