I just checked the file storage of my iPhone, and it says that the documents and data consume almost 14 GB of my storage. How can this happen, as I limited the storage to the minimum of just 100 documents?
** What versions are you on?*
On iOS 3.8.4 on OSX 3.9.6
** What is the size on your Mac?*
Database 1 “Eingang” on iCloud: 200MB
Database 2 on Webdav: 5.4 GB
Database 3 on Icloud: 60 MB
Database 4: 1.4 GB
** What sync method are you using?*
2x CloudKit plus 2x WebDAV
** Is deleted items empty?*
No, but 15 items shouldn’t make it
** Roughly what are the document types?*
Approx. 95% PDF+Text
So on my iPhone the size of documents are 2x compared to OSX. I would expect with 100 documents to be stored on the mobile to be at rougly 500 MB.
Something is fishy. Nevertheless I appreciate your support.
I sync three different databases and the Global Entry. Global Entry and one database is on iCloud and the two others are on a WebDAV share. I have no idea how sync stores are related to the database size, I can only state that the total of the databases is 7GB and it consumes 14 GB on my iPhone although I have the setting to just store a 100 documents.
I am not sure how that sound to you, but in my opinion it is a waste of storage on my iPhone that I pay a lot for. Actually I don’t want to buy a new phone for this or delete DTTG as it is helpful on the run.
What does it state in DTTG’s About panel when you tap the ? button? Also, when you send us the Console.log file we can better see what is consuming the space.
But in a nutshell what consumes the disk space is:
The databases that make up all the metadata and the relationships between the documents
The full-text index
The Spotlight index
The sync data that is kept for a while before being purged
The full text content is stored on-device for quick searchability, even if using a shallow sync. And the majority of your database is textual content, so I don’t see much surprising here.
As has already been discussed, there is more to it than that.
Do you have DEVONthink To Go’s Settings > Spotlight enabled? That uses space.
And open the View options > View submenu in a database. Do you have Thumbnails enabled? Those also consume space to store.
PS: If you’re using a shallow sync, you likely want to be able to do a text-based search on documents you don’t have downloaded to the device. How would you expect to accomplish that task?
I think you need to tone down your aggression/impatience a bit. Your tone is coming across (to me) as quite hostile and it’s not necessary. Three staff have asked you for more information - you’ve not provided all of it but you have provided some of it, and you need to give them time to troubleshoot your issue.
For what it’s worth, my single largest database (confirmed via File > Database Properties on the Mac, which you’ve been asked to confirm) is 12.6GB. I have 5 databases syncing including that one (the others are small ones) and combined probably total 15GB. I use shallow sync like you and I have DTTG set to keep 250 items. In app it’s reporting a size of 2.04GB, and in iOS Settings it’s reporting a size of 4.26GB. All of which is to say, there’s something unusual about your situation (we don’t get many complaints about this in the forum after all) and you need to let people work through the problem.
I assume you’ve checked for certain that purge is selected and you’ve run verify and repair on all databases (in DTTG, not your Mac)?
System-managed services such as Spotlight operate independently but their used storage is counted towards the app in iOS’ Settings. When you switch off Spotlight indexing it can take days to weeks before iOS has removed all data from it’s index. Why that is so? Apple knows.
Now, when you sync 7 GB of data it is first fed into the database and a search index is build. And the original sync packages are also kept around for a while to facilitate faster syncs afterwards. DEVONthink To Go also keeps a Core-Data-based database for everything that keeps all metadata, relations between objects, and more. So, yes, there is a certain overhead that a mere file sync such das iCloud Drive or Dropbox doesn’t have.
Unfortunately, the Console.log didn’t contain the information I was looking for as (I forgot) the lines in question are there only in debug builds. The fulltext index cannot be switched off, we are afraid.
And finally: When you use e.g. the Files app integration, files are copied for the file provider extension to access them. This is an AFPS copy that does not take up additional space but is, actually, counted as using double the space by iOS. This behavior is one of the reasons why starting with the introduction of AFPS it is extremely hard to tell how much free space there is on an iOS device or Mac. Drive space calculation have some guesswork built in now and so can be off, sometimes just a bit, sometimes a lot.
It may not be relevant, but in DTTG do you have or have you done anything with backup (options at the very bottom of settings)? If sync database from a backed up Mac you can turn the DTTG back up off. Exporting a database will create a zip file in the DTTG storage area on iOS.
Quite a few users, myself included, have noticed that certain apps on iOS, including DEVONthink To Go, can accumulate a significant amount of storage usage that doesn’t directly correspond to the actual size of their databases or documents. This might be due to how iOS handles caching or the app manages its temporary data.
From my experience and understanding, iOS does have a built-in mechanism for managing caches and freeing up storage when space is needed. However, this mechanism isn’t always perfect, and sometimes it doesn’t catch all cases where storage is being unnecessarily consumed. In some situations, the storage used by the app can grow substantially until we manually clear the cache by deleting and reinstalling the app, which can then lead to a reduction from, say, 15 GB to 1 GB. This suggests that there might be some optimization opportunities regarding how the app handles caching and temporary data.
I appreciate DEVONthink To Go’s robust features, but I wonder if there might be room for further improvements in managing storage more efficiently. For instance, more aggressive cache cleaning or user-facing options to manage caches manually could be helpful. This would ensure that valuable storage space on our devices isn’t occupied unnecessarily, especially considering how costly storage can be.
I hope this feedback is helpful and not perceived as unfavorable. DEVONthink To Go is a fantastic app; a few tweaks could make it even better. Thanks for considering these suggestions!
Upon reading @eboehnisch’s reply above describing what is in these files, which specific features do you feel are unnecessary when compared to the space consumed by the files?
On an older iPad, my databases consume about 24 GB according to DTTG.
And the newest iPad, DTTG freshly installed and synced, the same databases consume only short above 18 GB.
SpotLight is DISABLED !
Strangely, I also see a difference in item count - I had that before already and opened topics and cases for this.
Spotlight is not the only thing that can consume space. So can document thumbnails. Also, stored sync data can take up space, especially if you’ve changed sync locations without cleaning a previous one.
