Office lock file problem

There is no indication in that post the backend is anything other than WebDAV - definitely no mention of Google Drive.

Both Raidrive and Netdrive, according to their own websites, do seem to support locking only on WebDav or through WebDAV.

Wasn't this just the problem Google Docs and Sheets were meant to solve? Have done for me. Microsoft's equivalent capabilities seem to be very good too.

Sometimes marketing want to sell products that don't exist.

well so if you want to mount a cloud drive like you're doing in a company with network drives that can handle that Office lock files. How do you do ? there is actually no tool on the market ?

Microsoft Office 365 does it out of the box (to their own storage) and has done since 2017. Google Docs/Sheets did it for many years before that. No need for mounts; no need for locks.
Alternatively, make something yourself. rclone is great at what it is for, but nobody on this forum has suggested it does what you are looking for.

That said, I really hope you come back and tell all about it when you do figure out your answer. It is an interesting question - and a long time since I had to avoid edit clash by looking for those ~$filename.xlsx files.

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That is an interesting question.

unfortunately, for cost reason, we are already with office 2019 pro plus so no O365 for us...
We also used the office online solution and our sales team doesn't like it at all (everything that is web interface based), that's why i though about mounting a cloud drive would solve the problem...i didn't think that this file lock system was such a big problem...

@ncw explained why. as long as the file is opened, it is not sent to the cloud.

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Oh dear, that's two anti sales and marketing statements in the same thread. :grin:

:upside_down_face:

you could setup a webdav server
nextcloud, owncloud, using a synology box, even scary iis

Netdrive looked like they were essentially putting class2 webdav on a synology server between google drive etc and the user with a bit of ui for clearing leftover locks. Does rclone serve webdav support class2 locks? Read the docs on my phone and was no clearer.

@ncw what about adding an optional exception in rclone for files starting with ~$ and with the extension [xls,xlsx,xlsm,....,doc,docx,...]
and in this case upload the file... ? something like --lockfile false/true

@asdffdsa
you were right :sleepy: we did a test this morning with 2 licenced versions of raidrive + file lock addon, result :
the lock file is created and we both see it, but the file is 1 KB for the first one who opened the file and 0 KB for the second one. So for the second one there is no lock, and no warning pop up, it just doesn't work :sob:

i was hoping that it would work for you.

you could run your own server.
there are many ways to do that.

Today i received a message from RaiDrive, they asked me the logs to analyse the situation, there is still a hope...

just received this :
image

So they don't admit that it is supposed to work only on webdav...

Finaly i can confirm it works with RaiDrive + Gdrive. i didn't see that i had to check "File Lock" in the RaiDrive settings. i though this was automaticaly activated by the licence.
The licence just "unlock" the feature, and you have to activate it yourself.

image

So now we are all waiting for that feature in Rclone ! @ncw :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile:

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you tested the feature on two or more computers with gdrive?

2 different computers only.

Can you find out how it works?

hi,
i will figure it out and let you know how it works.