I use macOS Big Sur on both my laptop and desktop—and am going to reinstall the OS on both.
I use the CloudKit sync and DTTG on an iPhone and iPad, and just replaced my iPad so will need to reinstall DTTG on that, too.
I was unable to find clear recent instructions on how to do this—is there anyone who can point me to the correct help file or list the steps?
I know I need to backup and move the databases, obviously—but am wondering if I need to “clean” the Cloudkit sync locations and/or reinstall DTTG on the iPhone (since it’s the only one of my four devices I don’t need to reinstall on).
I can’t think of any reason why you should need to clean the CloudKit sync location (unless you no longer know the password for that sync location, that is), or reinstall DTTG on your iPhone.
I’m sure it comes up with some frequency; perhaps they’ll include this in future documentation.
As to cleaning the sync—since I need to reinstall DT3/DTTG on 3 of my four devices (laptop, iMac, and iPad), and I’m also getting a some “manifest missing” errors, I thought it might be a good idea to try it, per this advice:
In any case, I greatly appreciate your helpful response!
No problem There’s no harm in deleting your sync store* other than that the data will have to be re-uploaded. And if you’re having trouble anyway, then that seems a simple way to go
* other than that it is a copy of your data of sorts; it is not a backup nor advertised as such, but obviously can in some circumstances reproduce your data. Assuming you have backups and are not erasing all your devices at the same time, but instead doing one after the other, that should not be a relevant consideration.
I think there might even have been a user request or two for a migration assistant which performs the steps automatically, or provides an export and import function for settings, rules and scripts. It’s probably on the long list of things DEVONtech will be finishing off by teatime.
That would be fantastic—an export function seems like the most elegant solution. I wouldn’t mind if we had the options to sync settings across devices, too.
And thanks again for the sync tip. The CloudKit sync is an enormous improvement in terms of speed, and I do get that it’s not intended to be a backup, per se—so I do backup and archive all my DT3 databases weekly.
The truth is that DT3 is almost surely too powerful, complex, and feature-laden for what I need—which is really just a paperless life and home office, plus collecting internet research (which is why the less-than-stellar web-clipping function is so frustrating)—and I always feel like I’m a little bit drowning when using it. That said, I really love it and would like to take the time to properly read through the documentation and learn to automate sorting—but I won’t get to it by teatime.
That is just so worth it! I had to teach myself (a degree of) AppleScript to get everything going just the way I wanted it - but it’s been both fun and rewarding! Oh, and teatime repeats daily
There’s no harm in deleting your sync store* other than that the data will have to be re-uploaded. And if you’re having trouble anyway, then that seems a simple way to go 
I had to teach myself (a degree of) AppleScript to get everything going just the way I wanted it - but it’s been both fun and rewarding! Oh, and teatime repeats daily 