I am a new user of DEVONThink. I have been studying the manual, onboard help, and the “Take Control” book, but I can’t get my Dropbox sync to do anything.
Sync is enabled, as you can see from the attached screenshot. I went through the authentication process, and I can see a zero-byte file in Dropbox/Apps/DEVONthink Packet Sync/devonthink-dropbox.dtCloud. I also authenticated on my other computer, and specified the same location name.
It doesn’t seem as if anything is actually being pushed to the sync location. There are hundreds of documents in five databases, so it’s not as if there’s just nothing to sync. The documentation is quite opaque, as is the sync menu.
Have you configured a second device yet to synch with? Result? Any message in the log? Seen the trouble shooting section in the “DEVONthink Manual” (same content in Help)?
Best to ignore what you see on Dropbox as it’s a sync file(s) of use only to DEVONthink for syncing.
Do you NEED to use a third party sync service? As has been said in this forum so often, Bonjour is quickest and most reliable. Needs only that both devices be on the same internal network.
Hi @rmschne, thanks. As I said, I did attempt to set up a second device. It believes that it’s syncing, but no databases or documents were loaded. There were no error messages; it’s as if they were each interacting with an empty repository. I would like to be able to sync changes without physically collocating the devices, so I would strongly prefer Dropbox. As I said, I did read the manual–both the first- and third-party ones.
Well, my experience and judgement is that the instructions and trouble-shooting information are not as “opaque” as you suggest. Certainly the information there will be less opaque than perhaps random and irrelevant ideas here as we are not there.
My best suggestion is to go back to the “DEVONthink Manual” and
re-check each setup step on both machines (starts on page 60)
pay no attention to the DEVONthink sync files on Dropbox server
review the section in the “DEVONthink Manual” on “Troubleshooting” sync issues (starts page 187)
confirm Dropbox is working properly. Outside of DEVONthink, put some stuff in the your Dropbox and confirm it syncs to the Dropbox Folder and the other machine. Unlike the DEVONthink sync file(s) on Dropbox, these files are visible and useful to you on the server
My hunch is that the issue is related to Dropbox, but you provide me no evidence to support that as an actual conclusion. Perhaps review Dropbox’s FAQ on Troubleshooting to get some clues.
If you referring to a local folder on your Mac, you shouldn’t have that folder locally. If you read the instructions in the In & Out > Sync > Dropbox section of the built-in Help and manual, you’ll see you we suggest you exclude that from syncing.
Disabling Dropbox local storage of the sync folder solved the problem. The manual says only that doing this makes syncing more efficient and removes notifications, so it didn’t occur to me that this would prevent syncing altogether. Thank you all.
