Solved Sync/delivery problems multiple users editing the same Access form.

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.