Help & Manual with Google Backup and Sync, error

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Sergey Yu
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2017 9:42 pm

Help & Manual with Google Backup and Sync, error

Unread post by Sergey Yu »

Dear colleagues, please help with an issue.

I tried using Help & Manual 6 with Google Backup and Sync to collaborate on a project together with a partner. The partner shared a project, I added it to Google Disk, installed Backup and Sync to continuously synchronize files and collaborate on them.

When I open the *.hmxp on my PC, make changes and try to save, I get the same error message:

File helpproject.xsl cannot be written to filesystem
Image.png
Please help to solve this problem!
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Tim Green
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Re: Help & Manual with Google Backup and Sync, error

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Sergey,

Welcome to the forum!
I tried using Help & Manual 6 with Google Backup and Sync to collaborate on a project together with a partner.
That won't work. All it will do is make a mess that will be very difficult to clean up, and it is very good that this error has prevented you from proceeding so early on. That actually saved you from a potential data disaster. You should never try to use a multi-user-capable program like Help+Manual to collaborate remotely via managed cloud folders like this. They only have very basic multi-user features that need special support to work at all, and even then they don't work very well.

Here is our standard text on the subject of how to do multi-user editing both locally and remotely:

If all your users are on your local network you can use Help+Manual's own native multi-user editing. For this you just need to store your project in the uncompressed .hmxp format in a folder to which all users have read and write access via the network. Then all your users edit the program at the same time and Help & Manual manages access to the topics. When a topic is being edited by one user it is read-only for the other users until the first users saves and moves on. All other topics are accessible to the other users. See this topic in the help for instructions:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... diting.htm

Server licenses are not required for local multi-user editing on the same local network (LAN). That is also supported natively by the Professional version, but not by the Basic version.

If you wish to do multi-user editing remotely and offline (users in different locations, also needing to edit without a network connection), or if your network is too slow for acceptable performance when working on projects in the network directly, you need to store a copy of your project in a Subversion (SVN) or Team Foundation Server (TFS) version control system, which is actively supported by Help & Manual Pro and Server editions. Then each user works on a linked copy of the project on their own computers, which they synchronize via the SVN or TFS server. This provides all the advantages of direct remote editing, but each author is still working on their own local (but linked) copy rather than directly via an Internet connection.

Note that the remote authors will need their own copies of Help & Manual Professional on their own computers to do this, because the server version is for LAN only. Alternatively they could be using the server version on the LAN in their own office but working on a shared SVN project with that.

If you have not already deployed TFS in your company we strongly recommend using SVN rather than TFS. SVN is more flexible, easier to manage and configure and interfaces better with tools like Help & Manual. It is an open-source system and all the components you need for it are completely free.

Working with a version control system gives you the advantage that your remote authors can work on their projects offline. They only need to connect to the copy on your server to synchronize their work with the master copy. Before starting work they open the project and select "Synchronize SVN/TFS" in the Help & Manual toolbar to update their local copy with any new changes that other authors have made in the meantime. Then when they have finished their session they select Synchronize SVN/TFS again to merge their own changes with your master copy.

This works even if two people have worked on the same topics. If they have edited different parts of the topics the changes are just merged silently, because there are no conflicts. If they have both edited the same text you get a dialog asking you which versions of each change you want to keep ("mine" or "theirs"). Agreements between team members on which topics to work on can keep these conflicts to a minimum.

Once you have stored your project in your version control repository, which can also be made available online, each author downloads a local working copy of the project from the repository. This working copy is what they edit, but it remains linked to the "master" copy in the repository. Only changes need to be transferred in either direction, which means that once each author has their own local copy of the project only very small amounts of data need to be transferred when they synchronize their work with the master copy. This makes the solution extremely efficient and also very robust -- you have none of the data integrity and speed nightmares involved in live editing via an open connection.

For information on setting up and using Help & Manual with version control systems please see this chapter in the HM help:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... ed_vcs.htm
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Sergey Yu
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2017 9:42 pm

Re: Help & Manual with Google Backup and Sync, error

Unread post by Sergey Yu »

Ok, Tim, thanks a lot for quick reply! We will try to manage all this SVN documentation.
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