Let me start by saying, I think I understand the concept that DTTG “does not support indexing.” And I apologize in advance if this post is simply a request for a feature that’s not possible or impractical (I understand that sandboxing makes indexing on DTTG difficult). But I just want to see if this might be in the realm of possibility.
My use case is this: I’m a lawyer and I have all the files I am actively working on in one database grouped by client name. In some of these cases, I receive 100s GBs to 1 TB of data (PDFs, video recordings, cell phone downloads, etc). In these cases, I will keep all that voluminous data on an external hard drive in a folder that is indexed within the group for that client in my database. This external hard drive mostly remains connected to my Mac mini.
As has been correctly pointed out by Bluefrog in other posts, when I have tried to complete a bonjour sync to my iPad, DTTG has attempted to download a local copy of that data, which couldn’t complete because my iPad does not have that much storage space.
So what I have done is change the database sync on DTTG to download on demand and just download what I need from the indexed folders on the external hard drive onto DTTG. The downloads are accomplished over my local network, presumably through the database on my Mac, when the external hard drive is connected to my Mac.
Overall, this method works fine, but it would be nice to be able to unplug the external hard drive from my Mac, plug it into my iPad, and just be able to pickup where I left off without having to download the files to my iPad. In my experiments, this is not possible. DTTG does not appear to recognize the external hard drive as the location of the indexed files when it is plugged into my iPad.
So question is whether this essentially is just a longer drawn out way of saying “+1 for index support for DTTG” that the developers have thus far determined is impossible or impractical (no criticism express or implied here, that’s your prerogative)? Or is there some way through the files app that this could be accomplished that works around the sandboxing limitations? Any other recommendations or work arounds for this kind of thing that I am not thinking of would be welcome.