Solved Sync/delivery problems multiple users editing the same Access form. (1 Viewer)

[Gasman]

You can use a NAS box sometimes to act like Dropbox/OneDrive etc. Now the 'Sync' in the topic title makes more sense.

If this is the use case, then it's definitely a non-starter.

No, mine effectively act as servers, albeit in a home environment.

 

[cheekybuddha]

No, mine effectively act as servers, albeit in a home environment.

I was talking about the OP's usecase, not yours!

 

[Danylo]

Thank You Everyone for contribution and a lot of useful and precious information, I'm happy to say that solution is found. Thank you everyone who pointed to wrong sharing approach, during the test with LAN sharing, the issue disappeared.

 

[jdraw]

"I'm happy to say that solution is found."
Thanks for the update.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I understand that using multi-user simultaneous approach in Access is a really bad idea,

Don't blame Access. Blame your attempt to use a cloud BE. That is the problem as I said in my initial post where I had to guess that you were using cloud storage technology.

If you have the ability to move the BE from the NAS drive to the LAN for sharing, you will find that everyone has better performance and there will not be a sharing problem because Access does actually work for many more than 5 concurrent users. If you still have problems once you move the BE to the LAN, it will be time to examine the application design and figure out what wrong with it.

Even if you use a VPN for your remote users to get to the BE, there will not be a sharing issue. The VPN will be slow but it is probably the quickest, cheapest fix if that is what you are looking for. The best solutions for sharing Access over the web are Citrix and Remote Desktop.

You never told us why you must have multiple users updating the same record at the same time. That is just poor design and wouldn't work any better if the BE were SQL Server.

If you look for threads by @The_Doc_Man , he has explained in great detail why you can't share Access BE's using cloud technology.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

On the other hand, I actually HAVE used NAS for a BE and it worked nicely for a 40-user app, even though it crossed several sub-nets (and so did the 40 users). The keys to its success were that (a) ALL of the sub-nets were in-house so this was a true LAN, just a little bigger than normal; (b) it was a Gigabit Ethernet at a time when 100 Megabit was more common; (c) the NAS supported ALL protocols including SMB. The fact of it being NAS might not matter. The question is whether the device's on-board controller supports SMB requests. If it does, you've got a shot at it working OK. If not, you're done before you even start.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I am unfamiliar with the technology. Could it be that it works differently depending on whether it is communicating over a LAN rather than a WAN?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Basically, most brands that I have seen of NAS generally are a disk with a little extra set of smarts. The configurations vary and you could say that the NAS either has a VERY smart, network-aware controller or it has an ordinary controller and a network-aware microcomputer with a rudimentary operating system. But if you think about network-attached printers, the concept is the same. You don't log in to a network printer, you treat it like a network peer and exchange data with it.

With NAS, you have a disk controller device attached to your network and it responds to protocol-based requests that don't require a direct user login. Connections can be based on encrypted virtual channels for security, but in most cases with the Navy, the devices were inside a firewall-based barrier so outside connections could never get to them. The encrypted versions just encapsulated the user requests and responses to allow data to flow securely and safely.

I have seen smaller versions of NAS in Office Depot and Best Buy. Western Digital and Seagate used to make them in 500 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB sizes the last time I saw them, though that wasn't recent. Basically you install a device driver that does its I/O calls through a network channel and that gets you up and running. So NAS is not necessarily the same as CLOUD storage.

I have not seen versions that recognize whether you are on a LAN or a WAN, but don't claim to have seen every such device.

Having said that, there ARE versions of external NAS disks that DO act like cloud storage on your in-house network. It's all a matter of the protocols that the smart controllers will accept across the network.

 

[cheekybuddha]

So NAS is not necessarily the same as CLOUD storage.

Many NAS (eg QNAP, Synology) offer a lot more than some dumb hard discs on the LAN.

They come with a lot of software which can run VM's, media servers, automated backups and file sync type services like Dropbox/OneDrive etc. They can also serve as a cloud service over the interwebs.

I have a QNAP NAS, which I just use as dumb hard discs on the LAN!

Here's a screenshot of the admin page for mine:

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Many NAS (eg QNAP, Synology) offer a lot more than some dumb hard discs on the LAN.

I'm not surprised that the technology has improved. When I left the Navy job, the NAS disks were controlled by a system that allowed concurrent backups to run on an active system without getting into too many destructive interference cases. The FIRST of the Navy NAS drives were simply very smart controllers that did partitioning and various levels of mirroring. They grew in "smarts" as the controllers got better. About two years before I retired, they had even figured out how to do fiber-channel connectivity, and my system was one that could take advantage of it. Therefore, I had FC disks with something insane like Gigabyte transfer rates. My primary system's hardware could use that, so I had one the hottest mainframes on site. It was more than I had ever expected when I first started working with the Navy in 1988 and they had (at the time) machines that blazed away at an astonishing 8 MHz. Now I chuckle when thinking about how fast the machines became in just a few short years.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I have a QNAP NAS, which I just use as dumb hard discs on the LAN!

So, can you run an Access database linked to the NAS from Starbucks on your laptop? Doc says he's used such a drive to hold the BE but the OP is having trouble. Is the issue one of setup or feature set?

Can anyone make a definitive statement? Because if the NAS actually works for Access, that would be excellent knowledge to pass on. I don't have an NAS and I'm not buying one to test it but if someone out there has one, it would be nice to have a clear answer.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

It is not that an NAS works from any network, because it doesn't. If it is on a true or extended LAN, it will look just like any other disk because of the typical driver that is involved. BUT if it is on a WAN, it still has ALL the weaknesses of a WAN-based connection. We had a WAN-based NAS, too, as a place to share files over a region (which the Navy called a "claimancy.") I tried it as an Access BE server. Because with a WAN there is that old rule "never faster than the slowest link", we had ABYSMAL delay times including network drivers sometimes timing out because the WAN-based NAS was so slow. A lot of people watched the clock to maximize their exposure to the remote NAS drives - to times that because of time zone differences, meant that fewer people would be on it. I was able to do comparisons on operations between NAS on WAN and on LAN. Even with our extended LAN, it was still a matter of a fraction of a second for a big query on the LAN and several minutes on the WAN. We stayed with the LAN and never looked back.

 

[cheekybuddha]

So, can you run an Access database linked to the NAS from Starbucks on your laptop?

No.

(Perhaps if you vpn to your NAS but it would still be unusably slow, so still no.)

 

[cheekybuddha]

Because if the NAS actually works for Access

If your NAS just works as a file server on the LAN, then yes it's possible.

 

[Pat Hartman]

If your NAS just works as a file server on the LAN, then yes it's possible.

cloud drives work as file servers but they don't work the way Windows works. If you don't have time to actually check, that's fine. Hopefully someone will be able to make a definitive statement.

 

[cheekybuddha]

NAS != cloud drive.

I use my NAS as a file server on the LAN.

I don't (but I could) enable its Cloud serving ability and also it Dropbox equivalent ability.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Don't worry David, I'm sure that someone who has a NAS that they have time to test with, can give us a definitive statement. I would do it myself but I don't own a NAS and I'm not going to buy one just to test it to see if it can actually support being used as a BE for Access. To do this test, I would say you have to set the BE up on the NAS and the FE on your laptop and then take a trip to Starbucks and see what happens. Preferably bring two laptops so you can test multiple connections. Or open two different FE's that connect to the same BE.

Being a BE for Access is very different from a file share. We all know that NAS work as file shares. What we don't know is if they, when used as a network drive can be used as a BE for Access or do they have the same problem that options like Dropbox have making them useless for remote access.

 

[cheekybuddha]

Don't worry Pat, I wasn't worried!

To do this test, I would say you have to set the BE up on the NAS and the FE on your laptop and then take a trip to Starbucks and see what happens.

This isn't over a LAN - I was pretty definitive in Post #53 on this point. Working over a WAN is always treacly slow and unusable with Access FE/BE.

I have used FE/BE setup in the past with a NAS on a Local Area Network very successfully, but not with the actual NAS I have at the moment - hence my less than definitive statements.

Nor can I test at the moment because I don't have any Access FE/BE apps to test with. I haven't used Access in anger for over a decade, and back then I used MySQL backends.

If you wish to upload a FE/BE for me to test with on my LAN with my current NAS, I would be happy to - but working from Starbucks remoting in to a NAS won't work in any useful fashion unless you have an extremely fast and stable internet connection.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Thanks anyway but using a NAS on a LAN isn't going to help any one who needs remote connections. Remote connection is what this thread is all about. If people are all on the same LAN, the LAN technology with standard servers works very well.

If you ever want an app to play with, the new Northwind would be fine. You have to split the FE/BE so you have the two databases to connect over a WAN.