Greetings.
I have just started using DT Pro Office, and have a question that may be evident to experienced users. I would like to create a new database in my mac.com storage space. The idea was that I could access this database from multiple locations and always have it up to date. (I realize that for very large databases this may not work too well.)
When I tried to create a new database at mac.com, DT displays a message that says something like “Database already in use!” and options to select “Ignore” or “OK”.
Am I missing something fundamental here?
Thanks you any assistance.
I cannot discourage you enough from doing this. The WebDAV protocol as implemented by Apple is severely crippled, slow and completely unreliable for an application like DEVONthink.
Bill has written several forum posts about how he shares a database between multiple machines as have several other users written down their experiences. You could search for their posts using the search (or with DEVONagent).
iDisk access to a database is really much too slow for reasonable database responsiveness, so it will time out in initialization.
But you can accomplish your objective by saving to iDisk the compressed archive produced by DT Pro’s Back Archive script (Scripts > Export > Backup Archive).
I just experimented with this by creating a small (6.7 MB) database. I ran Backup Archive and saved the archive directly to the iDisk Documents folder. That results in a zipped and dated archive.
Now I can move to a different computer, download and decompress the archive and I’m working in that database. When finished, just run Backup Archive again and save it to iDisk > Documents. Now the updated database archive will be available on iDisk to download from another computer.
That would be impossible or unwieldy for a large database. Even the archive of my main database is too large to fit on iDisk. But it works well for a smaller project database, for example.
By posting a database in a Public folder in your .Mac account you can also share a database with others. I’ve done that a number of times.
Thanks Annard and Bill. I had a feeling that this was the case with WebDAV and databases.