I had a weird experience with DTTG yesterday, which I verified today.
I have a database saved on an external volume which has a lot of files indexed (not imported), which reside on the same volume (mainly media files, video and images). It also has a lot of imported files, texts and PDFs. The database is synchronized to my mobile devices via a personal WebDAV server.
I was away from the Mac, browsing the database. When I saw a thumbnail for one of the indexed media files, I wanted to see how the app responded when trying to download the item. After a while, I was very surprised to see the item appear online on the iPhone, even though it has never been included in the database as an imported file. I thought this was pretty amazing.
To confirm that, I tried the same thing this morning, only this time I unmounted the volume which contains both the Mac database and the indexed media files. In that state, there was no way for me to access either the media files or the database (I check in DTPO, the database had disappeared from the Recent list).
To my even greater surprise, the iPhone app managed to download the media file for the indexed item and play it. I double-checked the database in DTPO, and the items I used to test this with appear with an arrow next to them (“indexed”) and when doing “Show in Finder” they indeed point to their path in the external volume.
Do you use Bonjour or a sync store (e.g. Dropbox or iCloud) to synchronize your databases? In the second case the iPhone downloads the data from the sync store but not directly from the Mac and therefore it’s working as expected (assuming that the synchronization of indexed items wasn’t disabled).
It’s a WebDAV sync store. I wasn’t aware of the indexed sync option. Does this mean that all my indexed items have been copied to the sync store? Because otherwise I don’t understand how the sync server finds them…
DTTG does not support indexed items as DEVONthink on a Mac does.
Because of this, if you don’t synchronize the contents of indexed items for a sync location in DEVONthink, there will be no contents for DTTG to download. Not a good situation.
The general rule is: If you have DTTG on a mobile device to sync with DEVONthink on a Mac, always sync the contents of indexed items to that sync location.
Hello- new to DT and DTTG. Sorry to bother everyone but Im having trouble following the explanations regarding the on demand downloading of indexed files to DTTG. I’m afraid some of this information might need to be further dumbed down a bit for me.
My problem is I can view the small preview of the all the documents on DTTG but I am unable to download any of them. I thought I followed through with the various forum directions that I should have the “synchronize content of index items” selected. My databases are on my MBP directory Macintosh HD ▸ Users ▸ pjc ▸ Databases. I have set up an on demand synch through iCloud which works fine otherwise. Thanks in advance for more clarification. Im just not sure where Im going wrong.
Welcome @PJC
Have you done a Tools > Verify & Repair(or File > Verify & Repair, if you’re beta testing DEVONthink 3) on the database in DEVONthink to see if there are missing files?
