How to sync only some files?

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi,

I’m trying to use Sync (with DropBox) so that I can use DTTG to access the portion of a project that I’m currently reading/working on.

However, it is taking an extremely long time for DevonThink to sync, and I have hundreds more PDFs (making up many gigabytes) that I have yet to add to DevonThink. It’s not practical to sync all of that, nor do I have enough space in DropBox for the entire library. I only need and want to have between 10 and 50 items synced at any given time.

How can I set up Sync so that only a selection of my documents are uploaded? I thought that’s what the Mobile Sync group was for, but according to other posts on this forum, the behavior changed in a recent version so that the entire library is uploaded by default.

Thanks in advance!

2

You can’t Sync a partial database. If you need a smaller subset, create a small Syncing database for this purpose.

And yes, the Mobile Sync group is deprecated and will likely disappear from the Mac version soon.

3

Thanks for getting back to me!

How would this work if there are already tags, groups, and links associated with the document in the original database? It doesn’t look like I can replicate a document to the second database.

4

Hm, now I realize that also means I lose access to all my notes and other structure in the original database. I’m starting to think DTTG is not going to be a viable way to work (even though I already paid for it) because I simply can’t have my entire computer synced to Dropbox.

5

I hope you don’t have your “entire computer” in a DEVONthink database. :mrgreen:

6

I meant, rather, the things I keep on my computer: research, projects, writing, etc. It’s a lot.

7

@gd7 Assuming that you have paid for premium features in DTTG, how about creating a group called MyMobileSync, for example, then in DT-macOS replicating into that group the items you want to have on iOS. Just set the sync options to ‘On Demand’ for the entire database in iOS and MyMobileSync to ‘Always’. Would that work for you?

8

If you have such a large collection of data you work on that can’t fit on Dropbox, have you considered upgrading the Dropbox plan to Dropbox Plus which upgrades available space from 2 GB to 1 TB (1000 GB) for $9.90 / month. I have that plan and I also use the available space for incremental backups of my Macs with Arq. Or maybe there’s some other cloud option that’s cheaper to use.

9

Apologies for the slow reply; the forum did not notify me of new posts to the thread.

Regarding @khw’s suggestion, this does not work, because it still requires the entire library to be uploaded to the cloud, which is what I am trying to avoid.

@juranta, thanks for the suggestion, but my concern is the bandwidth used, and the time it takes, to sync such a large library to the cloud, and that’s before we talk about spending an additional $120 per year for storage I don’t need. All of these are overkill and inconvenient when my goal is simply to sync a handful of documents to iOS and/or capture things in iOS to sync back to the desktop.

On top of that, since I am someone who already backs up my entire user folder (/~) to multiple destinations regardless of what DevonThink is doing, it would be redundant to sync a large portion of that data to an additional cloud service, again, let alone paying for more cloud storage than what I already have.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, but it seems that by requiring an all-or-nothing sync, the developers have decided that the use case described here is not a priority.

10

For exactly this reason, I have just spent time splitting up my half-dozen DT large more-or-less anything-buckets into 28 smaller, much sleeker, much more specific, much-faster-to-sync, much-easier-for-my-iPad-to-handle databases. In terms of time and fiddling with files, the job was quite extensive, but - I believe - well worth it.