DT on the web

I’m a long time user of DTPro and I love(ed) it. But consider this. During the last 5 years we could observe an impressive move of services from the desktop to the web.
Now, only recently I started using Evernote. While it is far away - in terms of features - from DT it syncs between the 2 worlds of online and offline.
Thus web sharing for DT is not enough at all. We need a hosted service that supports syncing between the desktop and the web.

Anything in sight :question:

Cheers Thomas

We do?

Ever try syncing a GB of data on a regular basis? It gets to be a little tedious after a while… Most hosted services don’t deal with anywhere near the data volumes of a typical DT user. (And see the recent MobileMe debacle for the risks of promising faster syncing than you can deliver.)

FWIW, I detest Evernote, precisely because it insists on putting my data on the web. It’s my data, so it should be my decision where to store it.

Katherine

Seriously.

It gets tedious about the first time you do it, unless you’re on an OC-3 connection :laughing: Even standard home cable (in the US, anyway)'s upstream bandwidth would lead most normal people to cancel about twenty minutes into the operation.

There’s always , , and VPS hosting…

Hi guys I completely agree that there are some pitfalls to have in mind but there are a lot of advantages to gain.
In a nice world your first sync takes some days - awful I agree. But afterwards you do just blockupdates which means only those parts get uploaded that change.

Thomas

Ok, I’m no big Evernote fan, it’s cute, I use it sometimes when I have DTPO open and need to store miscellaneous items, but not in my main database (looking forward to 2.0 when I can just switch to another database). But it is too difficult to export files out of the program to be practical.

But, with Evernote, when you create a new notebook, you can make it a local notebook, so it will not be synced to the web. Also, in preferences, you can set sync to manual and that will stop the automatic syncing.

Which can still be several hundred MB if I’ve been using DT extensively. Not too bad if you only sync daily – my daily offsite backup usually takes 10-20 minutes – but of course the less often you sync the bigger the gap between the local and web versions.

Part of my confusion, though, is that I just don’t see many usage scenarios where the hassle of setting up and maintaining a hosted database would be worth it. I very rarely need to access my DT data when I’m away from my office, and when I do putting the relevant chunk of the database on a flash drive is quite sufficient. Certainly others have different needs, but I guess I just don’t see DT as the best tool for the kind of data that I need to access anywhere.

Katherine

  • What if you are on different computers (plus mobile handsets) at several locations?

Thomas

I do all my work on one laptop.

If I were in a situation where I needed to use multiple computers, I’d have a mobile 2.5" drive. They’re fairly cheap and staggeringly fast compared to cross-internet downloads.

If I were in a situation where I needed to use multiple computers and, say, my iPhone, then I’d just use DTPO’s web sharing for the iPhone and the mobile hard drive for the machines. Right now, though, the web sharing functionality is a toy, so I don’t forsee that happening.

If I needed to use another mobile handset, I’d suffer – but because DTP doesn’t have an app for Palm or Windows Mobile or whatever other platform.

But if I absolutely had to use the internet, I’d just the entire database bundle to my leased VPS ($9 a month for 50GB space and 1TB bandwidth) and download it again, and upload it when finished. Or use Amazon’s S3 system, though I don’t know much about it. But I’d only do that as an absolute last resort.