Inbox "growing" back

Hello. This is a weird one…

As soon as iCloud was available as a cloud option, I switched my two Macs and my two iOS devices, as I have a lot more storage on iCloud than Dropbox. I wasn’t happy with how laggy some of the syncing seemed to be (I blame it completely on iCloud, not DTPO), as well as a weird behavior I had never seen before: I would move stuff out of the Inbox on my iMac, go do something else, and then come back a few minutes later to find those same items had seemingly reappeared in my Inbox. I say “seemingly” because they were phantoms - the actual files were where I had moved them to, but the same files with the same IDs showed up in my Inbox again. I wasn’t able to move them out again, because they didn’t really exist, but I could delete these phantoms.

I had expected that this phantom Inbox behavior was related to iCloud and the slow/random sync, so I was very surprised when I switched everything back over to Dropbox yesterday, deleted the iCloud sync everywhere (as well as the iCloud sync store), and I just had the phantom Inbox problem happen again while on Dropbox. I had never seen this before last week.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Same here, I didn’t realize they were “phantoms” but now that you use that term, it makes perfect sense.

This is an issue after switching sync locations and merging local & remote databases, especially the global inbox, and moving items from the global inbox to other databases concurrently. Therefore you experienced this after switching from Dropbox to iCloud and vice versa.

To avoid this please wait until all all devices have been synchronized with the new sync location for the first time, afterwards you can continue to move items from the global inbox to other databases.

Another possibility is to upload the databases from one device to the new sync location and to delete & reimport all of them on the other devices. But this requires more time.

Following my question in

I do not think that the following is the reason:

“to avoid this please wait until all all devices have been synchronized with the new sync location for the first time, afterwards you can continue to move items from the global inbox to other databases.”

I performed the following actions (with one DB, all others would not be changed)

  1. I migrated exactly one DB from Cloudme to iCloud. I deleted the databases on my mobile devices and on my macbook.
    Then, I created the new iCloud Syncstore on my iMac and uploaded the DB from this device

  2. After sucessfuly creating the syncstore I reimported this DB on the clients by downloading/opening from the new created syncstore (step-by-step). This works fine and without problems.

The problems occurs after some day and it’s repeating regularly.

This is my installation of synced databases:

  • Global Inbox synced with dropbox (separate Sync Store)

  • 1 DB synced with dropbox (separate Sync store)

  • 3 DB synced with box (3 separate Sync Stores)

  • 2 DB synced with iCloud (one new, one migrated from CloudMe)

And ups, just in this moment the problems occurs again.
I imported two pdf’s on my iMac (main device) and moved them on my mAcbook in the target db (on box where there are now available as expected ). After some time they reappears now in my Global Inbox.

Did you use the iPhone/iPad concurrently? And does each database only use one sync store or multiple ones?

Sometimes, i’m using iPhone / Mac parallel, but I do not change this behavior. And before 2.10 I have never seen such a behavior

Three small DB’s using the same sync-Store on Box, all other DB’s have their own syncstore.
Exception is the iCloud, actually I have to 2DB’s syncing via the iCloud Syncstore

What sync location(s) is the Global Inbox syncing with?
What other databases are syncing with the location(s)?

The Global Inbox is syncing with Dropbox. An overview of my Syncstores shows the attached
screenshot (devon1.png)

The first two box Syncstore representing one DB, the last box syncstore represents 3 DB’s.
The tow Dropbox Syncstore representing also only one DB. (devon2.png)

Interesting are, may be the two iCloud entries. But the referencing the same DB.
I attached two separate screenshots for these entries (devon3.png)



There should be indeed only one iCloud sync location. Due to a bug of version 2.10, adding an iCloud sync location via the popup menu added it twice unfortunately, the next maintenance release will fix this.

However, this shouldn’t cause any real issues, only unnecessary overhead. But nonetheless I’d suggest to remove one instance and to check whether this will change anything.

I removed one iCloud Sync Store.

Now, since 6 hours the problem has not occurred again. :slight_smile:
However, I will give feedback in 1-2 days about the status.

For the record, I did remove databases, waiting a while, then did the syncing, and it seemed to work… for a few days. I have changed nothing else about the syncing since I last posted a few days ago, and yet today, I had the same problem - an item “grew back” in the Inbox twice on one of my Macs and once on my iPhone. I have been back to Dropbox sync for several days now and have not done anything differently from how I was syncing before the update that had iCloud syncing.

Anything else that would be helpful on your end to know about the circumstances of this issue?

Thanks.

Do you use only one sync store for each database now? On which device do you usually move the items from the global inbox to other databases and how?

Did you reinstall the application on a device lately or add/remove sync locations?

Yes, I only have one sync store. I usually do my moving around on one iMac.

Nope, nothing like that has changed, save for updating the app.

And how do you move the files? E.g. via drag & drop, the contextual menu or by classifying?

Most often by contextual menu and choosing to move. Much more occasionally for drag & drop.

It works properly for some days. But since yesterday this “UUID problem when try to move some items from Inbox to a Database” unfortunately re-appears.

See DTPO 2.10 (and DTTG 2.6.1) too buggy. Can downgrade?