I clipped two articles on iPad to DTTG. Then opened DTTG to rename them. Discovered all previous content in Global Inbox is gone.
Using iPad because computer getting fixed, so have no backup.
Since I assumed DTTG was reliable, stored important content there. All gone.
Back to Apple Notes for safety.
I can confirm that something is wrong. I filed a bug report yesterday when I lost everything in DTTG–all files, all groups. The app was full of data after my last sync, and then it was all gone.
I have not encountered anything like this before, and DTTG has been pretty reliable for me up until this point. Hopefully, the cause can be located and fixed shortly. In the meantime, you may want to make use of another app for your work.
Apple Notes does not clip web pages, though. You may want to look into an app that does and use it in conjunction with Apple Notes. Also, in the past, moving data in and out of Notes was quite laborious. You may want to consider a plain text app like SimpleNote instead. My preference is for Notesy or Byword.
SitRep: Resynced everything and all is well. Still, until this bug is figured out, I’ll be saving stuff in other apps just in case. Weirdly, even though DTTG was completely and totally empty, a file I made on the iPad yesterday (and had moved to its appropriate group) magically appeared in my Global Inbox on the Mac. I wonder where it could have been hiding, and why it was recreated.
Thanks, Frobgoblin. I’ll try the two you use. It’s getting tedious going back and forth to capture the URL.
BTW, Veritrope has got an AppleScript to take the contents of Notes into DTPO. I think.
Thanks! I’ll bookmark that. I haven’t touched Notes myself – no encryption, search is embarrassingly poor, no way in or out (at least, I couldn’t find one), and the list goes on. Perhaps it is better than Keep, but that’s not saying much.
I’ve made it another day without issues in DTTGO, it seems, though I somehow managed to overwrite new stuff with old stuff. It is probably user error, but I haven’t figured out what I did.
At any rate, I handle just about everything on iOS as if it will crash or lose my data at any moment, because they so often have! I have been betrayed so much by iOS over the years. My hope for 2015 is that Apple (and the developers of the apps I use) manage to come together and create a robust and reliable system. That’s whatI’ve been hoping for the last few decades, though, so I’m not holding my breath. It’s better than Windows 95 out there, but my iPad still manages to fail at the most basic stuff 
I am a massive fan of devontech and devonthink on the desktop. However the mobile app is not ready for more than just viewing. And the reliability issues are documented in reviews and forum posts.
Do yourself a big favour and save yourself many hours of troubleshooting and stick to the simple notes apps that sync with dropbox. Or use evernote.
Let’s hope dttg is sorted out soon.
I can’t use Dropbox or Evernote, because they are not secure enough for my use case. I work primarily in plain text, edit and create files in other apps, and copy / paste those into DTTG when I’m ready to sync. I also backup my DT database on the Mac every hour, and always before a sync, so even in a worst-case scenario, everything is OK. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to do this, but many apps on iOS 8 (not just DTTG) suffer from destructive tendencies, and I have learned from bitter experience to be very careful.
Fair point if you have high security information requirements. However for 99% of users the amount of hassle and possibility of data loss and as you mention backing up needed to check for errors seems extremely onerous.
I use the evernote and editorial combo on iOS then index or import from dropbox folders or evernote as required. However for high security used I understand this would be not possible.
However surely future implementations of devonthink sync would use some sync store on a dropbox like service or will there also be a local wifi option to use as well?
I’m a newcomer to Dttg and the same thing happened to me, which I posted in a different thread at the end of December. When I first installed it I did some experimenting, adding web clippings, creating new files…
All of this was going into the Global Inbox. I tried to do some organizing by creating folders but couldn’t move any of the other stuff into them. Apparently normal behavior according to info I found in this forum.
Then I set up an experimental set of files/folders in Devonthink to sync with Dttg. All seemed to be OK with my first sync — except that the Global Inbox and all its contents had disappeared. I finally got a reply to my post informing me that once you’ve started syncing with DTk on the mac the Global Inbox is replaced with the “Your Documents” DB. I was supposed to get a warning before I did the first sync but didn’t, so something is wrong.
Then I started doing more experimenting with Dttg and the next problem was that the syncing was behaving crazily. Some files were syncing OK and some were not. Additions I made to some files on the mac weren’t appearing in the Dttg files, and vice versa.
I finally decided to get rid of everything (experimental stuff only so nothing important) and start over. That took some doing because I first removed everything from the Mobile Sync folder on the mac and Dttg told me there was nothing to sync. After some fiddling and trying various cludges I managed to get rid of the garbage in Dttg and now have everything back to zero and ready to try again.
Keep the trash in DTPO empty for syncing. With items in the trash, sometimes certain files will not sync/update properly.
With that precaution I’ve been syncing GB size databases for two years with virtually no problems.
Sounds very stress inducing to have to do so much in order to sync with virtually no problems.
I think most buyers of dttg would not consider it properly functional. Data loss is no joke.
As I repeat dttg is not ready for prime time.
I agree that it is a little odd that the trash bin, which of all things does not even get synced with DTTG, has to be considered. Apart from that, I need to insist that I do heavily use DTTG and its syncing with DTPO in a “prime time” way. I cannot brush aside the issues that people have, which are obviously real, but for two years I have now been syncing multiple databases back and forth. Unlike most people, I put virtually everything inside the mobile folders, because I want virtually everything in DTPO to be available on my iPad. So we are talking many GB or data that is subject to the sync procedure. And all sorts of stuff, pdf, RTF, Word, Mathematica, you name it. Goes very smooth these days.
I also reject complaints about the “basic functionality” of DTTG. In my view, that’s exactly what it is supposed to be and what I want: Apart from some basic RTF editing capabilities, I want it to MANAGE my data, and then farm it out to programs that are SPECIALIZED to work on them. DTTG could never possibly be a replacement for iAnnotate or GoodReader for dealing with pdfs. Viewing, let alone editing, of MS Office files will never function right with any app other than MS Office (and I’ve tried many of them). So for me it’s nothing but a hub for my data. Surely, I would like to have improved search capabilities in DTTG, that approach DTPO, but do we know whether this is feasible with the frameworks available on iOS and the low-power ARM CPUs?
This even applies to DTPO: I pretty much ignore the built-in pdf editor, and deal directly with Preview (or Acrobat for heavy lifting). For a small company like DT, providing those capabilities is an uphill battle that they can’t win. “Do the things you know how to do, for the rest, farm it out”.
To recap: Maybe I’m lucky for reasons that I don’t understand, but with the single precaution of emptying the trash prior to syncing, I am syncing multiple databases at the GB level to DTTG and back and had no problems for a long time.
That is very valuable information for me. I will check if I can fix this for the next maintenance release.
I can confirm that the trashcan has caused problems in the past, and I always keep it empty as well.
Hi Eric, when I found this out last year, I communicated with Jim about it. I hit upon this by accident. At the time, I had made a rather significant re-organization and as a result, there were momentarily a lot of files in the trash. I then synced and immediately noticed that things were funny. Whatever I did, some files would sync, others didn’t. I decided to look at the actual files inside the DB package. I was suspecting that maybe some odd permission issue would prevent some sync operations. Then I noted something odd. One file that would never sync properly was one of two files inside that particular folder. But I realized that the other file was one that I recognized as having put in the trash on that day. I was surprised that it was still there. I realized that “putting in the trash” probably doesn’t move the file, but only adds a flag. It suddenly occurred to me that the existence of this file might have something to do with my problems, and I got rid of it by emptying the trash. Lo and behold, things worked perfectly! My hypothesis is that if one of the DB subfolders contains a trash item, the other, non-trashed items in the folder will have trouble syncing (note: I say “hypothesis”, because I did not investigate this further; all I know is that once I started keeping the trash empty for syncing, I never had a single problem again).
In the past, in some forum discussions about issues with trash, official advice was “do not keep anything in the trash”. I think that is a little misleading. I agree that people should not use the trash as “secondary storage”, like a garage full with decades of junk. But keeping it strictly empty at all times makes absolutely no sense. In that case I could as well use the equivalent of the “rm” command. The trash is there to put things in that (a) are definitely slated for deletion, but (b) linger for a couple of days, just for safety. For example, in Mail, I chose to finally delete trashed files after 30 days. That makes me very comfortable to delete things, because if I realize that I deleted the wrong item after a few minutes, hours, days, I’m still good to recover the item.
So I’m not keen on having to kill my DT trash just to sync, but on the other hand, it has not been much of a hassle. But if you can fix this, it would be great!
Added: Now that I think about this, this could have a huge impact on people’s sync! If my hypothesis is really correct, you end up with a very poor, inconsistent, sync, if you have a comparatively large number of trash items. I normally only have a few, and GB worth of synced data in thousands of files, so most of the DB subfolders do not contain trash items. But if that ratio different, you might have a trash item in virtually every subfolder and syncing might be completely inconsistent to the point of failure.
We think that we have found and fixed the issue. I have posted an updated Sync Agent plugin to the DEVONthink To Go beta tester group. So if you access to the beta group please get the updated plugin there and give it a test drive.
DEVONthink 2.8.3, released last week, should fix this issue with items in the trash, hopefully.