Best Practices, Common issues, and Solutions for installing and using ProMAX Sync software
ProMAX Sync is an intuitive, straightforward app designed to get you syncing to your teammates as quickly as possible. It relies on a peer-to-peer connection structure that transfers your data directly to your teammates as quickly as possible.
Notes on Internet connections and speeds
A fast, reliable internet connection with a large or nonexistent data cap will provide the best sync experience for you and your team.
- We recommend at least 25/100mbit up/down for consistent, reasonable transfer speeds of typical large video files. Where available, we highly encourage your team to utilize services like ATT Fiber or Google Fiber with speeds of 1000/1000mbit up/down.
Most cable-based internet in the US provides asynchronous speeds for its users
- This means that a user may be able to download at 1000mbit (commonly referred to as "1 gig" internet), however they can only upload at 35mbit. Yes, that's nearly a 285x speed difference between upload and download. This is extremely common in residential settings (where download of streaming content is 90%+ of the connection usage) and should be taken into account when estimating download speeds. Just because you can download at 1000mbit doesn't mean that the data is being sent to you that fast.
Technically any internet connection speed can work with ProMAX Sync
- Be aware that extremely slow speeds on one or more users within your group can cause significant delays receiving or sending new updates for those users. In our experience, anything less than 20mbit uploads can cause significant delays in file updates reaching the rest of the team. This is particularly true if your user shares the home with other remote workers or children who may be streaming during the workday, adding congestion to the already limited network.
Best Practices with Sync Spaces
When creating a sync space, the child folder name should be unique
- EXAMPLE: The space "/Volumes/Sync/Project Alpha/Footage" and "/Volumes/Sync/Project Bravo/Footage" will register as the "Footage" space, and the second one to be created would generate an error stating that the same name cannot be used.
NOTE: This is because we cannot control what folder path that another user may place this "Footage" space. If they placed both of the example sync folders into the "/Volumes/Sync" folder on their own system, one would potentially overwrite or merge data into the other resulting in a data integrity issue.
More active syncs will consume more system resources
- While resource usage is ultimately low if you're syncing to the system that you use for daily work we recommend no more than 10 active syncs on a well equipped editing workstation, potentially less on a lower powered laptop.
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- In particular, sync spaces monitor and check data inside all active sync spaces sometimes utilizing significant disk access time. If your workstation requires extremely high disk bandwidth (for example, editing multicam with a significant number of 4k+ streams), it may be worthwhile to utilize a ProMAX Mediahub to provide the same sync ability on dedicated hardware.
All sync spaces located on a drive will stop if the drive has less than 1% remaining space
- We prevent a sync from completely filling a drive to avoid complications if the drive happens to contain an OS or any programs that may require caching space to function.
- You can see the "committed" space, vs the actual used space in the progress bar of the drive itself. Used space is a represented by the yellow bar, and committed (but currently unused) space is represented by a dark grey bar extending from that yellow bar. This allows you to quickly see if you have enough space free on that drive to receive all currently incoming sync data.
You only need a user's Device ID one time
- Once another user's Device ID has been added to your system it will show up automatically the next time you visit the "Add user" screen.
Installation, Update, and first run issues
If you encounter difficulty installing or running ProMAX Sync successfully for the first time, try some of the steps below:
Uninstall and Reinstall
- If you encounter issues during an update, we recommend that you uninstall the existing version of ProMAX Sync on your workstation and install the new version from scratch. This can often resolve most installation and first run problems.
Sync Page never loads
- In the event that the sync page loads indefinitely (more than 1 minute), we recommend a complete uninstallation and reinstallation.