Changing Application Data location

Hi - so have you managed to change your Application Path to the Google Drive now?

I am still unable to change this on my Mac

Have we got a fix for the problem where a user is on a Mac and can no longer back up to Google Drive?

I moved your question to this topic, where all the previous discussion had occurred. To my knowledge, this was never answered. The discussion just fizzled out.

I notice, though, that you are now asking about backing up to Google Drive. Is that actually a separate question, or are you still referring to having the application data folder on Google Drive? If the latter, I don’t think you ever responded during the first exchange indicating whether you had closed and restarted. For two of us, that showed that the change of data path had actually taken place.

Hi, I’m just asking if it is now possible to have Google Drive as the Application path. It used to be possible, then after a new version of Manager it is no longer possible.

I don’t think there has been any answer to this problem. The discussions just seem to fizzle out without any solution.

Have you tried it again in the last two weeks? I don’t personally have any answer and don’t use Google Drive.

When you say have Google Drive as the application path do you mean:
a) have Google Drive as a folder on the local drive which then gets backed up to the cloud, or
b) have Google Drive as an external drive so that there is no local drive application folder.

My Application Path has always pointed to my Dropbox local drive folder and through all these Application Path changes I haven’t needed to take any corrective action.

When it used to work, I would see Google Drive as a folder on my Mac and this would be the application path - any changes were reflected in the files in that Google Drive Folder. I think this would then get (somehow) synced to the cloud.

I cannot change my application path to point to Google Drive on my Mac and have not been able to do so since the reversion back to those dreadful alphanumeric file names.

I’m not convinced you don’t have some issue with the way your Google Drive is set up. I see no reason why the naming of files would have anything to do with accessibility of a drive.

You didn’t say: have you tried this again recently?

As I say, it used to work. Nothing has changed with my Google Drive so there cannot be anything wrong with the set up. It works perfectly well for all other non-Manager files. The issue is that I cannot change the path in Manager.

No, I havent tried this recently, I didnt want to go through the panic attack which it gave me the last time. I was hoping there was someone there who had the same problem and could say “yes it works now”

I sympathize with the panic attack. After what I went through trying to replicate your problem, I’m not willing to experiment either. :sweat:

HaHa - I’ll download the latest version and give it a try this weekend once I’ve ensured I have other family members watching me, and some sedatives handy.

My original post on this was regarding changing the application data path to a folder inside the gDrive folder on my computer. However, I also tried changing it to a “normal” folder on my computer and got the same error message so. at least in my case, the problem is not specific to Google Drive. That makes sense because the Google Drive folder is no different than any other folder on a Mac, it just happens to be the place where the Google Drive software looks to go through its synchronization process with the files in your Google account in the cloud.

I was able to eventually get the application data path changed by following the path that @tut posted a while back which resulted in a different error message than I was getting but did in fact change the path and all seems to be working fine now. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the exact recipe for getting @tut’s error message which makes it hard for the developer to diagnose what happened.

I believe the clue is the fact that the path that is displayed in the error message does not include the actual folder that was chosen, it only goes as far as that folder’s owning folder (see my screenshot earlier in this thread). If that’s where Manager is looking for it’s files, then it definitely would not find them. Like others, I’m reluctant to try to diagnose this further in case I end up back in the same situation that caused this thread originally.

@clive Have you tried a test to see if you can change the data path to something other than your Google Drive folder? If the problem you’re experiencing is the same as mine, that won;t work either…

If I’m able to reproduce the issue, then I can fix it. I’m just not able to (yet).

I agree with @csmb that this is unlikely anything to do with Google Drive.

This could be closer to the problem, unless it is an error message limitation - only shows partial path. The final folder (in the application path) is not being “linked” to, and it appears that this is only occurring on Macs (?).

In @csmb’s screenshot the Manager folder was the fourth folder down the path - what does the error message do with a shorter path - gDrive/Manager.

That’s a question I mentioned back in post #21 of this thread. I’m not sure anyone has tried it on Google Drive. But the problems I described in an earlier post occurred just trying to change the folder to my desktop–so not a long path at all.

@lubos I’m thinking I can probably try to reproduce this again and take better notes on what I do. I will take a backup of all the Manager files before starting and hopefully that will enable me to get back to a stable situation again. My only question is, where is the application data path stored? I’m guessing it can’t be somewhere in the same folder as the data files themselves. If it’s possible to reveal that, I can include that file in the backup.

The path is in the folder in a file named data.

Ha! When you say “the folder”, do you mean the current application data folder or the default one? Not sure how things could work if it’s in the current data folder since the program would have to know to look there to find the file that tells it where to look… if you see what I mean :grinning:

No “path” file here in neither the programme, application default or application data folders

Well, this is an interesting turn of events. I was speaking about the default application data folder, which is where my data currently resides. I actually hadn’t thought about the question of how the program knows where to look for path data. But here are my application data folder contents:

The file data is a text file. Here are its sole contents:

And that’s the path to my application data folder. It was created and last opened and modified 27 days ago, the same day I tried to duplicate @csmb’s problem and had to delete everything and start over. My application data has not been moved since. So I assumed the program created the file to store the path.

There is an alternative, which is that there are internally stored global preferences for date, number, language, and data path. As long as you don’t change the default, maybe the program runs with those. If you do change the default, the file gets created. Or maybe the preferences are stored elsewhere. In fact, now that I think about it, the data path was moved to Preferences from About Manager only recently. So maybe the file was necessary previously, but no longer is. Manager does not delete relic files.

To test that, I just moved the file outside the data folder and relaunched. Everything opened fine. And the program did not regenerate the file, as it will with the 00000000000000000000000000000000.manager file. So I conclude that file is useless. More importantly, that leaves @csmb’s question of “where is the application data path stored” unanswered.