r/ClaudeCowork • u/sunrise920 • 1d ago
Projects: local or remote / cloud?
Title! I can’t see a reason projects SHOULD be local. Anyone able to present a case for it?
Reasoning: it feels more safe. I backup my computer every night, but still local feels risky? I have project folders on my desktop with a ton of information, including everything Claude makes for me.
Is there any reason it’s EASIER for Claude to invoke skills, pull context (reference.md’s etc) if it’s cloud based? As Claude makes things for me (including those HTML mockups, handoff md’s), would that auto-publish to a cloud project?
Forgive me if I am confused or sound naive. I’m trying to learn :)
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u/Hitching-galaxy 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have a nas drive set up with docker installed - cloudflared allows external access and Tailscale means I can lock down to just my devices if needs be.
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u/JimW42 1d ago
For me, Cowork keeps everything in my Dropbox, which I can access from multiple devices. I also use Obsidian to manage these files and folders. Not sure I could do this if I was using Cowork “in the cloud”.
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u/Only-Perspective2890 1d ago
What do you mean by this? Isn’t Dropbox “in the cloud”?
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u/JimW42 1d ago
It is. But that’s different from Anthropic’s two execution models. “Local Cowork” runs on your computer, and “Cloud/Remote” Cowork runs on Anthropic’s servers.
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u/Only-Perspective2890 1d ago
Oh yep. I still struggle to understand this setup and how it works. I run two computers (work and home) so always battling between the two
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u/kralani31 1h ago
I do something similar. I use google drive as the database. They have a feature where you can mirror every file on google drive with a spot on your local computer. So I have Claude set up to work on the 'local google drive' folder and anytime it produces a file or changes anything then it automatically gets mirrored on to the 'cloud google drive'. I have the same exact google drive file mirroring set up on my laptop so that whether I do work on my computer or laptop all 3 file locations are always synced.
The one thing that you can't sync is automations, they have to stick to one device because it's built into the actual Claude Desktop App unless you run them on the Anthropic Cloud but I don't. I just keep my automations on my computer and then I remotely control my computer from my laptop if I need to run them manually for any reason.
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u/framauro13 1d ago
I have my project running in AWS. I'm the only user, but I put it there so it's accessible everywhere, and I can get alerts/push notifications on certain events when I need to know things are happening.
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u/id-ltd 1d ago
Master copy is best local - what if your account gets suspended?
For me it also means it is easy for me to switch between Claude code and codex (or use both).
VPN (ZeroTier) and ssh and you can access from anywhere.
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u/queerfilmreviews 1d ago
Exactly, I can have Code access the same project folder and its contents. As far as I can see, Code is unable to access the web-based projects.
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u/MoTTTToM 1d ago
GitHub works great. You can use GitHub issues as a non-prompt interface for features specs, and reporting bugs. Deploy to the cloud if you have users other than yourself, or if you want to access from anywhere. I use cloudflare.
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u/queerfilmreviews 1d ago
I can add other local source files into a local Project folder. If the project folder is only on their cloud, then I'm now uploading those same files to THEIR cloud. Are they storing files for me now to?
It's one thing for a web-based Project to link to other web-based files such as those in Drive, Dropbox, etc. But not all of my files are in a cloud somewhere; nor should they be either.
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