Online storage

Dear Members,

Excuse me if this is not in the correct category of questions. The more I study Twine and Harlowe, the more I realize I need to have an online storage place for my media.

There are a great many choices. For my needs, I do not need much storage space at all.

If you would be so kind, could you recommend something? I have Google drive and Microsoft Onedrive but I’ve read that it’s better to not use this. Right now, I only have about 200 students who’d use my Twine projects.

Excuse me if I’ve made any mistakes in protocal and thank you, in advance, for your help. -Gavin

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I use a Dropbox account for development files I want to share with myself. I don’t know if they let you have 200 users for free but the file sharing via email and invitation options are in there.

Another option - you could post your Twine projects on itch.io in draft mode. Draft mode is private but you have a fixed “secret” url you can give to testers. Game project pages can provide downloadable files, I believe up to 1GB.

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Thanks for your reply.

I have used Google Drive for the last several years. Other than being Google, what are the drawbacks you mention with Google Drive and M$ Onedrive?

For a start, people will use derisive terms like “M$” at you.

(Of all the criticisms to make of Microsoft, “they have wanted to make money since the 1970s” is surely the least biting…)

Serious answer:

Google Drive, Dropbox, and the equivalent services of Microsoft, Apple, etc are meant for personal storage. They’re great for backing up your project folders. They work well for sharing a test package with a group of testers.

I don’t recommend them for hosting media files for a published game. They are not meant for that; I worry that links to those services will break in the long run.

For example, there was a shift (about 2016) where all of these services blocked the ability to share live HTML. Before that, you could host a Twine game directly on Dropbox and it would be playable. After 2016, you couldn’t do that. (The file would still be present, but it would be displayed as raw HTML.)

You can still host live images or other media files, but what if they block those too? Or make all the links into “download” links? Or put limitations on how many users can view the file in place? Or change their organizational system so that the old URLs no longer work?

These are all reasonable changes for a personal-storage system, but they would break hotlinked media for Twine or other web-playable IF.

Itch is meant for hosting published games, so you don’t have these worries. Of course Itch is a tiny private company without the inertia of Google or Microsoft. So you get to decide.

On the other hand (there are always more hands) you might not be worried about long-term storage at all. If you only need the files to stay accessible for the academic year, the concerns about Google etc are probably not relevant. Most years aren’t like 2016. (Then again, a few are.)

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They already do: downloads are rate-limited in practically all free personal storage services, so if your game suddenly takes off and becomes popular the links will break at the worst possible time when a lot of people try to access them.

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The large dot com corporations have always been about assimilation. In data storage things always change. Storage mediums and formats change over time, always will.

Amazon Web Service (AWS) has grown exponentially in the years since Amazon began sharing their server facilities. Their service isn’t free but can be very low cost.

Also, you can get a very decent (virtual) server from Linode for $5/month.

With any storage you have to be agile and ready to adapt on short notice.

I’m not familiar with Twine and Harlowe flie formats, but my 2p is that I use either GitHub or BitBucket for almost everything code-based that I do (for me, for IF, this is simply the Inform 7 ‘story.ni’ file).

Unfortunately there’s a bit of overhead with these systems regarding their use (they are not drag-and-drop on the desktop in the same way that e.g. Dropbox is) and I am fairly certain you can’t run anything live from the GitHub or Bitbucket websites, but a public repository on either system should be accessible by many people concurrently.

Yup. For text adventures/IF, git should really be a no-brainer.

Bitbucket gives you 1GB of git LFS too, so you can add media files too if you’re careful.

I haven’t tried it, but GitHub Pages is a thing that exists.

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Github Pages is great, Parchment itself runs from it.

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It would seem that itch.io would not have this problem - their business model is distributing game files.

Thank you for your reply. It was very appreciated.

I tried Bitbucket and it seems to work as I had hoped.

-Gavin

Much obliged. That solved this problem! Very grateful.