I’ve got Bonjour working very well and I am habituated to connecting my phone and iPad to the server on my laptop at the end of every day and it works well. I definitely make new docs on iPhone and laptop every day and sometimes the iPad is the writing tool of choice.
The change that’s coming is that I have a gig where I’ll be leaving my laptop at home or in an office and be taking my phone and iPad into the field for a day at a time.
In this case I was thinking of making the iPhone the Bonjour server as I’ll be on my own local wifi network in the field and would like to have the phone and iPad syncing throughout the day. I can do the end of the day sync to the laptop when I get home.
With my gig based career at the moment I would probably switch back to making the laptop the server on the next gig.
Is there a downside to changing the Bonjour server around with some regularity? A best practice for doing so?
And yes, I’ve tried Dropbox and iCloud synching, legacy and new style. I could never get it to work as well as Bonjour, which…. well it just works.
There should be no issue with the iPhone acting as the Bonjour server for the iPad.
What you don’t want to do is have the iPhone acting as the client of the Mac and the Mac acting as the client of the iPhone.
Oh that was something I did way back at the beginning while I was figuring it all out.
And switching the server back and forth from phone to laptop as my work requirements dictate, that shouldn’t be a problem?
I don’t see any particular issue with what you’re proposing.
I got this working, mostly, by switching my phone to be the server and it synced to the laptop. The iPad however hasn’t been syncing.
I have all the connections made between phone and iPad (I think!) and the available databases show up in the Locations tab of the preferences on the iPad, as “Not Yet Synced”. The activity spinner appears occasionally but it never actually starts syncing. I have shut off all VPN, restarted both the phone and iPad. Every database still shows as “Not Yet Synced”.
I’ve also tried toggling off/on the sync toggle in the Locations setting for all databases but get nothing other than the quick activity spinner and then back to “Not Yet Synced”.
The sync icon is cloud with empty circle which according to the DTTG manual is:
The current or all databases might have changes that need syncing but the sync location is still processing incoming data and so doesn’t know yet.
Not sure what I am doing wrong. Is it just a matter of leaving them both open and awake for a fixed period of time?