Twice in the past few months, clients have asked me to look at a problem they encountered using an Access database file with Dropbox syncing. The users observed that multiple copies of the database were generated, with a suffix like “(Phil’s conflicted copy 1-24-2012)”. This is what Dropbox does when it finds that two different people changed the same file since the last sync occurred. (Even though that’s not exactly what happens with the Access file, that’s how it gets interpreted by Dropbox.)
If that doesn’t make sense to you, the important thing to know is that this behavior is a known problem. One workaround is to not use Dropbox syncing for the database file, but instead to explicitly move the file out of and into Dropbox for each working session. Of course, this is rather impractical to do in a true multi-user business environment.
As I mentioned, two clients had this problem recently. One was able to use the workaround described above, because their multiple users were not simultaneous users. The other client connected an external drive as a shared drive between their four computers, and moved the Access file out of the Dropbox folder onto the shared drive. In future posts, I may explore some other ways to share a database across multiple users when they are not connected to the same local area network.