Extra Ordinary, the Series

I want to create NDVIDIA Omniverse projects with a backup of all my files in the cloud so I don’t lose everything if my desktop dies. How best to do it? The files can be large. In this blog I explore a few options:

• Omniverse Nucleus
• Microsoft OneDrive
• Google Drive

Note that a different approach is to use a more robust file versioning solution such as git. For now I just want simple backups, so I am leaving Omniverse and git for another day.

Omniverse Nucleus Servers

Omniverse Nucleus is a very cool capability for teams. You can host your content on a Nucleus server and have other team members work live in the server with you. You can use it from Omniverse tools like a network drive where changes are automatically synced between users. This allows collaborative editing of scenes. There are things like a caching service to speed up local access as well.

To access a Nucleus server, you assign a name to a host and port and then you can use that name inside paths to resources on the server. There are also tools like Omniverse Drive that give you traditional file explorer access to the content of the server (makes it easy to edit files there using Photoshop or similar – it looks like just a file on a filesystem).

There are also add on services available, such as semantic search which can index your drive contents and find assets without you having to enter lots of metadata. Got a collection of bushes scattered across your server? You don’t have to manually organize them, just index them and you can perform searches to find similar assets wherever they are in your server.

Nucleus comes in two forms – a workstation version (free) allowing a few people to share files locally and an enterprise version (paid). The enterprise version has features like robust authentication and deployment patterns for the cloud. It also has version control built in, allowing checkpointing and similar.

As far as I can see, there are no cloud providers (yet) supporting Nucleus servers directly, so as an individual there is no great benefit for me in using Nucleus. If I started working with some friends, I could see benefit, but not enough benefit to go to the enterprise version. It’s really for serious production shops doing projects for money. So it looks really nice, I can see its benefits, but it’s not for me as a hobbyist with no friends (everyone say “awwwww”).

Microsoft Drive

I have a Microsoft 365 family plan with generous storage (1TB by default), so I thought I would try that to sync my local files to the cloud (in case my desktop dies). Syncing happens silently in the background, so while it might chew up network bandwidth, it does not take much effort on my behalf.  I just edit raw files on disk, and OneDrive will copy the files up to the cloud.

My personal problem however is I have C: (SSD) and D: (HDD) drives. I am putting my Omniverse work on my D: drive. My C: drive is faster being SSD, but getting full, so I am putting up with slower access speeds on my HDD, but I have less worry about running out of disk space.

And that is where my problems come in with OneDrive. As far as I can tell (including forum threads), OneDrive can only mount one local drive for replicating to the cloud, not directories from different local disk drives. I back up all my Documents etc. content on my C: drive to the cloud and don’t want to lose that. There are some options involving creating symlinks across drives, but I assume if I get another computer and sync it up to OneDrive, it will try then to download all my Omniverse files too. I really want separate drive mount points so I can control what to sync where.

So this removed OneDrive from contention for me.

Google Drive

Next I gave Google Drive a go. I had not used it to sync my local disk to a cloud folder before – I only previously used it as a cloud storage area where I drag files into a web browser to upload. There is however a Google Drive executable you can install which will sync that directory contents to the cloud. It has a side bonus that “My Drive” in your Google Cloud storage area is now available as a G: drive on your machine, making it easier to copy files to/from your drive area instead of up/downloading via a web browser session.

You can bring up the Google Drive app from the task bar

This allows you to add new folders to sync. E.g. open the app, click the cog, and select “Preferences”.

Streaming is what I want for “My Drive” – I don’t want all the files downloaded to my computer on my main area, consuming local disk space. Instead, I used the Google Drive app to add a new directory, D:\GoogleDriveSync, which is mirrored to the cloud (the only option for additional directories added this way).

This new sync directory became visible under the “Computers” area just under “My Drive” on the Google Drive web page. So I get all the Google Drive sharing etc capabilities while getting the contents of my selected folder synced to the cloud. Nice!

Conclusions

I am not here to say “Google Drive is the right solution for everyone”. I probably would have used Microsoft OneDrive since I already had a plan there, if it supported multiple drive mount points. There are also other cloud storage providers beyond these two which I am not evaluating here. I just went with some big names. If you look at other options, just be sure to check if they support multiple drive mount points and their pricing. You really need lots of storage, more than traditional documents or paperwork that many cloud storage solutions are designed for.

For pricing, Google Cloud at the time of writing is ~$2 per month for 100GB, ~$3 per month for 200GB, with ~$10 per month for 2TB as the next step up. OneDrive (reading their webpage) seems to suggest 1TB per user is included in the Microsoft 365 plan, which seems good value if you already have the plan. (I hesitate however as my OneDrive page talks about only having 100GB total available, so I might need to read the fine print.) If you start downloading NVIDIA Omniverse demo projects and put them in the shared area, you will start consuming content pretty fast. (If I start using assets from the demo projects, then I will want them in my backed up area in case the demo files are taken down in the future.)

The bottom line is plan to do some up front research on where you are going to place all your files assuming you want a cloud backup solution. For a serious sized project, you will need a plan with lots of storage. I also install the Omniverse applications in my D: drive, but in a separate directory that is not synced to the cloud (I can always install them again).

I would love to use Nucleus Enterprise as a cloud provider service (if affordable), but it does not seem to be an option.

But for now I have a plan. All my project files are going under a D:\GoogleDriveSync\ folder so if my desktop does die, I don’t lose all my work. Nothing fancy, but it does the job.

I am still thinking whether to use a local Nucleus server on my desktop, but I was not sure what memory, CPU, and storage overheads it will add. An appealing bonus is all the path names to files on the server use a symbolic name instead of a hard coded path name on my local computer. But I like to keep things simple. Not using it means there is one less thing to go wrong. I may change my mind if a cloud provider service became available (hint hint NVIDIA! ;-).