Client project links getting messy

What do you mean the links start breaking? What links? What are you trying to accomplish?

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

I mean the client-project links randomly unlink or go missing on shared projects.

Sounds like you may have some automations running that are overwriting your linked fields, probably because the automations are updating the Client record’s link to Projects?

Try looking through your revision history to see what exactly happened, it should point you at the automations that are doing this and you can update them from there.  Specifically, you’d remove the update of the link in the Client record and update the Project record to link to Clients instead, this way the each Client’s Project list will keep growing instead of the older ones being unlinked

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If you look through the revision history and can’t figure it out direct message me a link to your base and I can take a look at it for you!

Are your clients sharing links to projects stored in an Airtable attachment field? These expire by design

https://support.airtable.com/docs/airtable-attachment-url-behavior

One solution is to host the project files in a different location (such as your website or cloud storage like Google Drive / Dropbox) and just store links to the files in Airtable. Then the links will not change.

Natalka

Wait, are you saying those airtable link timeouts could mess with the vpn too or just the file links?

Airtable links to files stored in Airtable attachment fields will look something like this:

https://airtable.com/appXXXXXX/tblXXXXXX/viwXXXXXX/recXXXXXX/fldXXXXXX/attXXXXXXX?blocks=hide

where the “XXXXXX” are alphanumeric strings. You don’t need to be behind a VPN to load these links because they go to airtable.com. However, if you would have to log in to view the record, then you will have to log in to see the file. 

Hope that helps

Natalka

If you’re sending links to attachments in Airtable, those links will expire in 2 hours after the person views them for the first time.

If you want non-expiring links to work forever, they you would need to move those attachments to a cloud drive (such as Google Drive), make the files publicly accessible, and then send the link to the attachments in your cloud drive.

This process can be fully automated with Make’s advanced automations & integrations.

Here’s an example of an automation that “bulk moves” a ton of attachments from Airtable to a cloud drive. 

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Is google drive the only option? Actually I have installed cx file explorer where I can attach different cloud drives and can access data within this app.