Lucid Link | Host AWS

Sysadmins Remote Workflows
1

Hi Guys,

I am about to start a big project where I will manage two teams in different time zones. I don’t want to host the entire project on my NVM hard drive and share it through Lucid Link. I don’t think I have enough space for this. I would like to host it on a cloud option like AWS, Wasabi, etc, and cache just what I need. I would like your thoughts guys. Have you ever done that? Is AWS s3 the best solution for this?

Thank you,

2

It’s definitely doable. It depends on a some parameters, and how your project is organized.

There are a multitude of file-sync utilities that understand the cloud storage protocols. So it’s very easy to get a drive and have it mirrored into the cloud automatically. With options of one way copy, one way sync (deletes are propagated), and two way sync. Including preserving changed/deleted file history on the cloud side to prevent accidental deletes.

But these are the tradeoffs vs. using LucidLink. You might decide they’re worth flexibility and the possible savings.

  • Any of the filesync approaches do not provide file-locking. So you are not protected against accidental overwrites if two people change the same file at the same time. You have to have an offline protocol for that. Depending on how your work is split up and how disciplined your teams are, that may be ok.
  • All the file-sync utilities that copy individual files perform well on large files, and are slow on file sequences. So if you deal with a lot of EXR renders, you’ll see a significant performance disadvantage compared to LucidLink. There’s no fix for that. LucidLink packages files up in larger blocks for transfer, no other tool does that currently.
  • Wasabi is not really an option. While they have favorable pricing, their pricing is predicated on being a backup, not a file sharing solution. They have limits on egress that make it poor fit. You can got with AWS S3, and that will work fine. But I would do the math to see if you’re really saving money. LucidLink uses AWS S3 storage and pays a bulk rate, while you pay the small business rate. You may not come out ahead. But Lucid’s pricing is more complicated these days, charging per member and then for extra storage. So you have to model it yourself.

One part I’m not fully understanding: It sounds like you already have LucidLink, but you are concerned about your NVMe size.

For LucidLInk your local cache drive should be NVMe. But your entire project doesn’t have to fit on it. As you upload the project into the filespace, you can copy more data than fit on your NVMe, LucidLink will automatically manage that. For LucidLink your NVMe is a cache, not storage.

Your storage limit is your filespace not your local storage. And the size of your filespace only depends on your credit card, not a physical limit. After you finished uploading, everyone can work, and your local NVMe only holds the files that you are working on yourself (or reviewing), everything else just sits in the cloud.

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3

Yeah you have it kinda backwards.

Lucid Link has essentially infinite space. See how much “available disk space” my file space has?

Screenshot 2025-06-08 at 9.11.43 AM
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Lucid Link doesn’t serve your local storage to the inter web, it is your local storage, of which you cache locally with ssd/nvme storage.

Unless I’m missing something, Lucid Link has End of Lifed the Wasabit bit. Or, at least, they’ve been asking me to upgrade mine for the past year. They say it’s archival . It works for me and my use case, which is 10-30 artists banging on it daily. From edit to design to cg to Flame.

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Ow! Man! I misunderstood how Lucid works. I had in mind that my storage limit was my local storage. So, I can exclude the AWS S3 from this equation and keep only the Lucid link, as long as I increase the Lucid storage amount. Once I upload everything to the cloud, I can unpin the media from my local hard drive.

Thank you, mate.