How to resync everything from an iPhone to iPad/mac?

I guess, like many others, I’ve suffered file ghosting. A lot of my files are stored in indexed directories, and they’ve all been nuked as well (PDF, markdown, Word…)

I had switched to the new iCloud syncing on everything.

Luckily, my iPhone DTTG is not too badly damaged, and there’s still an iCloud (legacy) store on there - what I’d like to do is make the other DEVONs sync down from that version, but not affect any of the sync store on my phone (ie, prevent upstream from my damaged mac database to the iPhone or iCloud stores). Is it possible to force this to happen? I have no idea of the sync state of the new iCloud system, and can’t assume it doesn’t contain the same errors.

I feel your pain, DEVONteam. You’ve released a working and significant update, and on top of having to investigate and fix it, you’ll be fielding endless queries like this one.

You would have to delete your existing database first on the Mac (but please keep a copy) and then to import it again from the sync location via Preferences > Sync.

Better would be to enable incoming connections in the Sync preferences on the iPhone first, to connect DEVONthink 3 on the Mac to the iPhone via Bonjour (it should be shown in the list of sync locations in Preferences > Sync) and to import the database from this sync location as this would definitely not affect any existing sync locations.

Thanks - I’ll give this a whirl later. I downloaded DTTG 2 on my iPad, which also seems to have a set of intact documents, so there’s hopefully some breathing space should I foul up on my own.

I appreciate the reply whilst everything else is happening, @cgrunenberg !

You’re welcome and thanks for your understanding.

If you reinstalled DEVONthink To Go 2, then launch DEVONthink To Go 3, does it resolve the ghost files?
Just curious.

Hey Jim,

Just launched DTTG3 at your suggestion. No change I can see, but I did variously delete the ghosted files in DTTG3 and change the DB there. I also got nervous and turned off all the syncing in DTTG3, so I couldn’t see it try to get things from DTTG2.

Is there a particular order or configuration of settings I should use to try this out? Happy to follow your lead and explore your suggestion, as long as my DTTG iCloud store survives!

I would just follow Criss’ suggestion then. Cheers!

… well, to sate your curiosity @BLUEFROG, I installed DTTG3 and told it to sync down from CloudKit., hoping it would pick up the missing files from DTTG2. It hasn’t - but perhaps there’s something else happening, like I deleted those files from DTP mac, these deletions have been replicated into the CloudKit storage, and then DTTG3 didn’t try to restore from DTTG2’s storage as the files were already flagged as deleted?

I’m speculating, but I’d definitely point more at the corner that I painted myself into than non-confirmation of your hunch.

And yes, I’ll try to sync things back down from the phone tomorrow! Thank you both for your suggestions and ideas (as always!) :+1:

You’re welcome and yes, the number of intermediary moves has likely changed any expected or anticipated outcomes.

Let us know tomorrow how things go.
:slight_smile:

Okay, that was a slog. The ghosts kept coming back!

In the end, what worked best was to disable all the autosync (macOS, iPadOS, iPhoneOS) and methodically work through each one separately, checking file integrity after each one. I suffered lots of cloudkit rate errors, which usually required walking away for some coffee to resolve.

One lesson I’ve learnt from this is that restoring items from TimeMachine backups is a lot easier if they’re in an indexed directory rather than the main DEVONthink database, where they may be more scattered. I’m pushing as many of my key references to such Finder-based directories as makes sense.

Also, having a git repository of written items (stored as Markdown) is also very helpful for selective restoration (I have a respository in the DEVON database parent directory, and ignore everything but .txt, .md, .markdown files in it - the neat thing about this is you can then see the differences between your remote and local files, resetting or commiting as needed)

Thanks again to the team at DEVONtech and my sympathy for the (mutual) traumas that have been suffered!

1 Like