Can someone please solve a mystery for me. I am going to start pulling my hair out.
I am currently using sketchup free on two different computers. I sometimes use it in Chrome but mostly in Firefox (when I need to work in two different trimble accounts at same time, I use the two different browsers - only work around for having multiple accounts open at same time).
Anyways, I religiously hit the save button as I work. I think all is good, only to later open my account up on a different computer and have an old version of my model appear in the open menu. The “sync with cloud” and “use local version” buttons are there. So I click on both buttons to see which is the correct model. Lo and behold, my latest saved version isn’t there. Grrr.
Same thing happens when If I open sketchup in another browser. There is a totally different local model version - must be whatever was last saved in that browser.
Big Question is: Do I need to somehow sync my model with cloud before closing it on one computer/browser and switching to another?
BTW: Sketchup Creators - it would be really nice to not have a local copy/cloud copy/autosave file instantly delete the other versions when you open it. It is sometimes impossible to tell if you have the right file until you open it. I wish it was like the “drawing recovery” menu in AutoCAD when you can open each file before permanently deleting the obsolete copes.
Just trying to understand, you say you are using 2 different accounts on different browsers. Models won’t sync across different accounts as I’m sure you know. But just to clear up that’s not the expectation here.
Can you describe the “use local version” button? Is it the cloud button with an upwards arrow next to the file?
Also you can go to https://connect.trimble.com/, find your model and download all revisions of it. There should be a revision corresponding to each time you hit Save.
Another recent topic on the health of models saved via SketchUp Web (aka Free and Shop currently) pointed out that you need to be very careful to not exit the browser (or close the active tab?) before a save operation completes. If the browser is terminated prior to completing the save operation, the resulting model in the cloud is not healthy (perhaps not even updated at all).
I have not used SketchUp Web yet, so I don’t know if there is feedback in the SketchUp Web’s user interface to indicate when the save operation is complete.
Sorry for the confusion. No I am not trying to sync between accounts. That was an unnecessary explanation as to why I am using different browsers at times.
I am talking about syncing one account. I was under the assumption that if you hit save it would automatically upload to the cloud. This seems to happen sometimes but not other times. And, yes, I am waiting until it is fully saved before exiting the tab/browser.
Yes the “local copy” button I mean is the cloud with up arrow.
I wonder if sketchup is sometimes saving to a local copy when it cannot save to the cloud (i.e. a temporary internet connection issue). Makes sense in terms of a backup in case there is a cloud/internet connection blip. I just wish it would let me know when it doesn’t upload/sync properly.
There seems to be no way to know until you go into the “open menu” and see the two cloud/arrow buttons.
I wish it was as simple as that. A palm to the face would have solved my issue (a solution to many of my problems actually. lol).
It’s actually easy to tell if its saved. The “save” button becomes a “saved” button. Thumbs up to sketchup on that one - I wish more web-based apps made it as clear.
Oh, I forgot to say thank you for the trimble connect link. It is awesome to have a running log of the different versions in one place.
I checked the log and sure enough there is a four hour period that I know I worked and there are no upload logs. It must have been saving local copies then. I had internet so I’m not sure what was up. This isn’t the only time this has happened - it’s just to only one I can remember.
Thanks @lolo, I think we have more clarity on this issue now. SketchUp will first save a model locally into the browser cache and then upload it to the cloud. The issue here is that when it displays “SAVED”, it hasn’t necessarily finished uploading to the cloud quite yet. That happens in the background. Of course, the user doesn’t see that so the browser can be closed before the upload is done. We initially did not think this was a big problem since the model is already in the browser cache and can be uploaded later (which is when you’ll see the cloud icon with an upload arrow). We were clearly wrong on this assumption and working on a fix to be released ASAP.
We will not prematurely display the SAVED status until the upload is done. And we’ll warn if you try to close the tab while an upload is still in progress. Sorry about this confusion and thank you for taking the time to report this in detail !
For the time being, as a workaround you can wait a bit more after saving and before closing the browser. This “a bit more” is of course dependent on your internet speed and the size of the model. There will soon be a visual indication on this, like I said.
However, it’s still not clear to me why this caused you to lose your changes. They would have been in the browser cache and should not have been lost, unless the browser cache was cleared somehow. Again, very sorry you lost your work and would be great to understand how this happened.
Speaking as a long-time professional software engineer, I am glad to see the forthrightness and clarity in your post, Bugra. As you more fully realize now, browser caches are not a reliable storage service.
Thanks for this. I think the loss of data was from hitting the “download from cloud” button instead of the “upload to cloud” button. It wasnt intuitive because I had assumed that the cloud copy was more recent because it appeared to save before I closed it.
Can I make a suggestion for the update… Since I have a rural Internet connection that is slow, the fact that it does save a local copy is important. Please keep this feature. As long as it notifies me that it didn’t upload and there is upload button I can hit later, I am happy.
Considering my slow internet I was amazed how well sketchup free works. As soon as a program is web based I always worry about whether I can use it.
@TDahl Thanks and agreed. Browser cache was never intended to be reliable storage but a cache to speed things up. If you already have the correct version of the file in cache, you don’t have to download it from scratch, which can save a lot of bandwidth for the user. But obviously we made things confusing in this case and we’ll improve it.
@lolo Makes sense thank you. Clearly the current system is a confusing so we are looking into simplifying things. We’ll keep the cache but will make it clearer when the file actually got pushed to the cloud.
@bugra do you plan to allow different account sign on across multiple private browsing tabs in Chrome in the future? I was wondering why OP would be using Firefox and Chrome rather than using incognito tabs so I tired it myself but the new Window login updates the previous open tab. In this example I was logged in under one gmail account but was overridden by the account on the right in another window.
