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My team’s use of Airtable is growing a lot this year. As we develop new bases, there is basic, teamwide information that is repeated in tables across those bases. For example - locations, events, people.

I’ve researched synced tables and feel like I have a basic understanding of how they work. Often, though, my experience is that I learn while building or doing work that a certain feature doesn’t do what I thought it would do based on my research.

So I’m just looking for community feedback on this approach - perhaps setting up a base that houses tables with these basic details and then syncing those to multiple other bases. Are there limitations on the way you can use/interact with data that is coming from another table that make this not worth it? 

For me the main things to look out for are:

  1. Field name changes in the source don’t sync over, causing confusion in the long term
  2. Synced tables have limitations with automations
  3. Synced tables only pull data if the base is used / pinged via the API in some form
    1. I realize that generally this is fine, but I was experimenting with a system where I had Base A that synced data into a ‘Master’ base, and then I synced data from there into Base B.  The ‘Master’ base just never updated since it wasn’t used by anyone

 

I’d say it’s generally worth it just to keep your data in sync across your bases; you can find workarounds around the synced table issues, but not around keeping the data in sync you know what I mean?

Okay, yeah, that’s really helpful. Thanks!

 

I’m wondering if you - or anyone else who stumbles across this - has any experience doing this in a way where you end up having to switch some existing bases. 

I have one base that is already using what will be the starting point of my Locations table in ‘Master’ base. So there are existing linked records, and maybe some automations. 

Ha, unfortunately I do have some experience with that, had to slowly go through and swap everything out sigh

It works for a system I’ve done whereby the ‘master’ base has tables that are read-only for other bases. In this case Projects, Clients and Users that are used in about six other bases. 

I think there are problems if you have to synch data by allowing updates from the client bases.

Got it! 

 

I started in on making changes to one of my existing bases to “re-route” linked records and I can definitely see how this is going to be tedious!

 

Good to know re: read-only. That’s the approach I’m taking so far. We have a small number of users, and I think most will have access to the master base anyway, so I think it will be best to just have any changes made there instead of in the client bases.

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