I would like to use Sketch in offline mode for a temporary period. Reason: I’ll be working from abroad for a week and I do want to save on roaming costs. Since I’m the only designer working on my sketch files, I do not need ongoing Sketch cloud synchronizations.
Of course, I could turn my Mac into offline mode, but this would also mean being offline for other services, which I don’t want. Sketch is the only software, which could be temporarily offline.
is this possible?
by the way: I’m wondering, why each and every single time I open my sketch files, the whole “package” will be synched and downloaded, which often means 500MB per file etc. - which is a lot (yes, I could compress some files, but besides that…). Isn’t Sketch synchronizing only the adaptions (incrementally…)?
Sketch should be well suited for this. A few observations:
You can download the documents locally to your Mac. You can easily do this from the web view. Later you can then make changes locally and through the toolbar re-upload a full copy of the document – when you’re back home for example/
When you open an existing document from the workspace for the first time, Sketch downloads the entire document. However, any subsequent times you open it, most of the time we only download the patches that have been created since by others so the catch-up is quite quick and cheap. Caveat: It really depends what others are doing to the document as well. If it’s changed significantly and new versions have created, you may well find yourself downloading the entire document rather than just the patches that let you catch up.
With all that said, what I would advise, to give you optimal control over roaming costs, potential account verification issues, etc, is to download the documents to your Mac locally and edit them there. When you can, you can upload a fully copy back to the Workspace – like when you’re on wifi/home again. Benefit: You can test this workflow today.
thanks pieteromvlee
(super fast response, this forum is great so far, thanks by the way)
ok, this will work, I’m sure. however it’s a bit a “cluttery” workflow, since I then work in different files (original = workspace document / then download a copy of this and save this localy / then I save this again in the workspace later on). If I understood correctly, it’s a bit “redundant” in terms of copies, right?
but it will work, I agree.
I’d rather prefer an offline toggle, so I still work in my workspace file, which just won’t be synched until a toggle back to “online”. Wouldn’t this be feasable and a better approach?
this is strange, since I’m the one and only person working in all of my Sketch files. Even if only small changes are done, the day after I reopen one of my files, the whole bunch (ex. 500MB) is downloaded again. Each and every time for all of my files. This doesn’t look like an incremental synchroziation for me, hm.
Well, yes you’re creating a second copy of the document locally, which you can push up to replace the one in the Workspace when the time’s right. The offline mode you mention should be happening automatically when you’re not on wifi; it’ll just take the latest local copy and you continue to edit that. (Behind the scenes its a local copy in your library folder, just not one that you see). But the roaming thing makes me think that you may be online, yet not want Sketch to use data, and indeed, there’s no “work offline” switch. Maybe you can fake it with a tool like LittleSnitch, but I’d take manual offline route instead. It feels safer.
2, We’ll look into that, that’s somewhat unexpected for sure.
Following-up on the second point: You may be the only user, but are you making changes to the document on multiple Macs? The only reason I can think of why the full download would happen is because we decided “squad catchup”: that rather than downloading a 1000 of collaboration patches, and patching them locally, that a full download would be better.
If that doesn’t explain what’s happening, can you DM me the link to your workspace document? Based on its ID we we can then check the logs to find out what is really happening here.
I’ll DM you. I’m the only person and also only working from one device.
however, I must confess that I granted access to some collabs, but they didn’t do anyhting in there, just viewed the file.
Maybe it could help you for the questions (or maybe not). But I had the same issue until I identify the reason.
I use the app “Clean My Mac” to delete files and caches to keep it clean and to get more free space on my computer.
Clean my Mac seems to delete some Sketch files in the cache and you need to re-download files after doing the cleaning.
I’ve juste unselected Sketch for my future cleanings
Pieter, what you think? All three points also apply to myself and the last one is something we didn’t cover in our DM conversation.
It’s funny Pieter. Just after our last DM of this morning, I opened another file (which I worked on a few days ago) and it started to download its 200MB or whatever. I haven’t run the Terminal command to be honest, but yah…
maybe there is still something here…?
thanks a lot arnom
I know this app but I haven’t installed it. So in my case, it can’t be the reason.
but thanks anyway, it would have made sense to me.
cheers
