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[rmrfslash]

Hi all,

I go back and forth between different machines all the time and have setup a general strategy for most games I play: I symlink the save folders from my dropbox and, viola, poor-man's save-syncing! However, DF has given me some trouble. I'll outline my steps below:

• Starting on Mac, I created a world "region2" moved it to my dropbox folder, symlinked it to DF, embarked, and played for a few seasons. Yay!
• Then on another Windows machine, I symlinked the freshly synced "region2" folder from dropbox to DF. DF recognized the world and save, and I played for a few seasons, yay!
• Back to the Mac machine, I made sure the "region2" folder from dropbox was up to date, opened DF, tried to Continue Playing, but was faced with a "no results found" message (I turned off DFHack just in case afterwards and still DF found no save even though the folder clearly exists where it is supposed to). Boo!

What gives? Does anyone know what happened here? Both machines are running 40.19, DF Hack 0.49.19-r1, and newest versions of PyLNP and MacNewbie respectively.

[LordUbik]

Uhm... awkward!  I had to do this trick for a while and i've never experienced this issue.

When you get back to the mac do you copy-&-replace the save folder or you erase the old one?

[rmrfslash]

I actually don't do either. Dropbox overrides the old files with the new files and I don't have to do any manual copying since the "region2" folder name in the DF/save is actually a symlink to the updated files in my dropbox.

[wierd]

No, He/She is using a symlink.

A symlink is kind of an alias, or pointer.  It allows a single folder to be shared between multiple places.  It's a thing in NTFS and basically all UNIX like filesystems.  *Nix flavor OSes and BSD flavor OSes use it pretty aggressively for system libraries and the like.

In this example, the dropbox hosted file share is attached to both systems using a symbolic link.  The file is never copied, it is just accessed from both machines.  Something windows users may be more familiar with would be a windows file share, such as on a NAS. The deal is that the folder in the share is mapped into the local filesystem using the symbolic link. The dropbox folder LOOKS like a local folder, but is still physically on the dropbox server. Copying never happens.

The issue might be that the mac is using filesystem caching, and the contents of the filesystem changed behind its back. It is expecting a local disk after all, which should not have its contents changing mysteriously. Another issue might be date/time related, if the clocks of the two systems accessing the share are not synchronized. This may make files that are "Not legal" because they have a creation date in the future, as seen from one of the system's POV.

So, I would first make a backup of the save, then issue a sync command on the mac to make sure that the filesystem buffers are clean, make a test file on the share using the mac, delete the test file, then see if DF sees the saves again.  If it doesn't, then look at the system clocks of the two systems, and the creation/modification dates of the files in the dropbox share.  If the systems dont have matching clocks, point them at a conserved NTP server. There are several public internet ones. That should keep the clocks in sync so that files created by either should not be "in the future".