Offload
Offload into an existing project
Day five of a five-day shoot. The project is set up; you just need to push today's card into it.
Once a project exists, the in-project ingest wizard is a shorter version of the full new-project flow. It already knows your project, your primary folder, and your destinations, so there's nothing to set up beyond picking the source.
You start it with the Ingestbutton on the project page (or from the project's More actions menu). The wizard collapses to two steps: pick the source, review and start.
1
Plug in the card or external source
Mount the source the usual way. Tusk auto-detects connected removable volumes.
2
Click 'Ingest' on your project
The Ingest button is in the project header. The wizard opens with a source picker.
3
Pick the source folder
Navigate to the folder on the source that contains the files (e.g. /Volumes/SD_64GB/DCIM/100MEDIA). Tusk shows a count and total size of the files it found, plus a warning if any are above a sensible per-file size threshold for sanity.
4
Decide whether to also copy locally
The Also copy files to local working folder switch is off by default. The label below shows your project's primary folder so you can see exactly where the local copies would go if you turn it on.
5
Review and start
The review step shows the source, the destination list (with green/red dots for connection state), the conflict-resolution choices (if there are any conflicts), and a Start Ingest button. The button auto-enables when all destinations are connected. No manual refresh needed.
Screenshot
Ingest page in Tusk showing the review step. Display the source folder path, a summary like '147 files, 312 GB', the connected destinations with green dots, the 'Also copy files to local working folder' toggle, and the 'Start Ingest' button.
alt: The in-project ingest wizard at the review step
If destinations are disconnected
If any of the project's destinations are currently disconnected (drive unplugged, no internet for cloud), the review step shows them in red with their labels and disables the Start button until they reconnect. The button enables automatically the moment Tusk detects every destination is back.
Local cleanup panel
If Also copy locallyis off and your project's primary folder already contains files with the same names as files on the source, Tusk surfaces a local cleanup panel. Two reasons this happens:
- Earlier ingests landed locally and you forgot to delete them.
- You manually copied files into the primary folder before running the ingest.
The panel lists the conflicting paths and offers two choices:
- Delete local copies and continue: removes the local files (with explicit safety warnings) so the offload can write the canonical source files to your destinations and not the stale local versions. Tusk warns that this is destructive.
- Switch to copy locally: turns the copyLocally toggle on. The local files become the destination, and Tusk handles them via standard conflict resolution.
Conflicts with files already in the destinations
Tusk also checks whether files on the source already exist on any of your destinations (either in the file index or physically present). If so, you get a conflict-resolution panel: skip the conflicting files or overwrite them. The Conflict resolution page covers this in detail.
What happens to other syncs while ingest runs
Normal backup jobs for this project pause automatically during ingest so the queue doesn't fight itself for drive bandwidth. They resume the moment the ingest completes. Other projects keep syncing as normal.
The Ingest button is also a great way to add an external folder
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