What happened when Pushkin’s IT team stopped babysitting sync issues

Working late to finish a project is one thing.

Working late because you’re waiting on a sync bar crawling across your screen is something else entirely.

For many teams, sync issues don’t show up as a single failure. They show up as background friction, shaping how days are planned, when work gets handed off and how close deadlines really feel.

For IT teams, managing the friction of large, shared files under deadline pressure can feel like a full-time job.

That’s the reality Pushkin’s production and IT teams described in a recent webinar, where they shared what changed when sync stopped being part of their workflow.

Pushkin produces some of the most anticipated podcasts in the world — Revisionist History, Against the Rules, The Happiness Lab and more — with teams spread across cities, time zones and freelance. 

Watch the full session here, or read on for highlights.

When IT becomes the sync department

For Pushkin’s IT team, sync issues went from being an occasional technical concern to feeling like part of the job.

Every stalled upload, corrupted session or missing file eventually landed in IT’s lap — not because the tools were broken, but because when production stalled, someone had to untangle what went wrong.

Day to day, that meant:

• Time spent diagnosing sync states and cache behavior instead of improving systems

• Constant context switching during already tight production cycles

• Little room for proactive planning or experimentation

“There was this sense of impending doom,” said Ben N-H, Senior Producer on Revisionist History. “At some point we were going to update and the Google Drive–Pro Tools link was going to break.”

Once sync issues faded into the background, IT could finally step out of reactive troubleshooting mode and focus on building infrastructure production could actually rely on.

The hidden cost of “working” sync tools

For a long time, the drag felt normal.

Sync clients technically worked. Files usually arrived. Projects eventually opened. But the cracks showed up everywhere else.

Pushkin’s teams dealt with:

• Local drives filling up with massive, hard-to-clear caches

• Files stuck “syncing forever” or disappearing entirely

• Overnight uploads becoming routine (and unreliable)

• Producers and engineers blocked waiting for files to finish moving

• Issues surfacing at the worst possible moments

Ben remembers it well:

“I would save things late at night and just let it run all night, hoping that would somehow fix the problem. But often files would get lost in the sauce or your entire drive would vanish and you’d have to resync everything.”

There were no alarms or dramatic failures, but there was a constant background hum of risk.

Why sync tools break down in large-file production workflows 

Sync tools aren’t broken. They’re built for a different job.

Most sync-based workflows assume files can move quietly in the background. That assumption works fine for documents and lightweight assets. It starts to fall apart when files are large, constantly changing and tied to active production.

In real creative and media workflows:

• Files don’t just upload once, they change continuously

• Projects depend on many linked assets staying perfectly in step

• Conflicts don’t show up early,  they surface during handoffs and deadlines

Over time, teams compensate. They wait longer and they upload overnight. They avoid touching files that might be “in the middle of syncing.”

At that point, the tool is running the team, not the other way around.

LucidLink as infrastructure, not another tool

Implementing LucidLink let Pushkin remove a step from the team's workflow entirely.

Instead of syncing, uploading and downloading, teams work directly from shared files, as if everything lives on a local drive.

• No syncing or local file duplication

• One shared source of truth for active production

• Engineers and producers working from the same files, for real-time collaboration

• Fewer tickets and emergencies after the switch

“It ended up being entirely a nonissue,” said Senior Producer Lidia Jean Kott. “We had one learning moment and after that, I don’t think we had a single problem.”

Often, it’s the tools you barely notice, the ones that slot naturally into your workflow, that make work move faster.

Security and control without tradeoffs

Going faster didn’t mean giving anything up. 

With zero-knowledge encryption, permissions and snapshots, Pushkin’s teams could open access to freelancers and remote collaborators without increasing risk.

“We were kind of just busting at the seams quite a bit where, you know, what we were using was not really able to handle the file sizes and the amount of content that we were producing,” said Lidia.

“And, LucidLink handles just that. It's been a really great tool for us and a tool for me specifically where I'm not having to address multiple IT issues in regards to syncing.”

File access became simpler, without becoming looser. IT didn’t have to choose between speed and security.

Snapshots: a safety net, not a panic button

Speed is only useful when it’s safe.

LucidLink’s snapshots (taken every 15 minutes) gave Pushkin’s team confidence to move fast without fear.

• Accidental deletes are easy to undo

• No scrambling for backups

• No stopping production to recover files

“Snapshots are like in-moment backups,” Sarah Bruguiere, IT and Engineering Manager explained. “If something gets deleted, you can just go back, grab it and move on.”

Instead of reacting to mistakes, IT could trust the system to catch them.

From firefighting to lifecycle ownership

As sync problems disappeared, something else changed. IT reclaimed ownership of the bigger picture. Pushkin’s teams moved from reactive support to proactively owning the scalable infrastructure their productions depend on.

• Active projects stay fast and accessible

• Older seasons move cleanly into archive

• Storage usage becomes predictable

• Hidden local costs disappear

That breathing room made new workflows possible, including Pushkin’s move into video production.

“There’s no human that could have pulled this work off if someone was still getting pinged with all the day to day corrupted sessions,” said Jake Gorski, Sound Designer. 

Why this matters

When IT stops babysitting sync issues, the whole organization wins.

• Creative teams move faster

• Deadlines feel stable, not fragile

• Freelancers onboard without friction

• Infrastructure supports growth instead of resisting it

Even small wins add up: fewer late nights, fewer lost files and more time spent creating instead of waiting.

That’s what happens when file access stops being a liability and starts acting like infrastructure.

Watch the full Magic Hour with Pushkin to learn how their production and IT teams made the shift — from babysitting sync issues to building for what’s next.