Have been looking and looking and surprisingly cannot find anything about this out there.
I run DT:O on my main mac. I want to be able to also access the database on my laptop, when I am on my local network.
I had presumed that I just needed to buy a copy of DT, run it on my laptop and Bob’s your uncle, Fanny your Aunt.
But no, it does not seem to be that simple. I have tried using the web interface but its just too basic; for example no way to convert RSS story to PDF.
My desktop machine contains the databases. I frequently work on a laptop in the same building, on the same LAN. Making sure that any database is only open on one machine at a time, I have file sharing activated on the desktop, and then on the laptop navigate to the database on the desktop and use it. It’s quite simple to remember to close databases and quit DEVONthink on the machine I’m not using. No cumbersome sync’ing is needed.
k, if thats what I have to do.
Does seem very backwards for a programme that seems so cutting edge; just like the license not letting me use either my desktop or laptop, even Adobe give in on that.
Opening a database on two machines simultaneously will invariably damage the database. DEVONthink isn’t a multi-user app – IIRC, it’s never been marketed that way – and doesn’t have the sophisticated (and costly) multi-user features of, say, FileMaker Server. BTW, the license doesn’t prevent you from using the software on two machines, as long as you are the user – it is a seat license, not a machine license.
I had an odd experience tonight when copying a DThink database from one machine to another on my home network. Because almost all the files were imported (not indexed), I reckoned just a straight File Copy using Finder was the best bet. I closed the database on DThink. But when I copied the 98MB database to the other machine, near the end there was a warning about a permissions problem. When I opened the database on the other machine, most of the contents were not visible. You could see the index entries in the correct places but the preview panel gave an odd and incorrect path for the file, as if it had tried to guess where the file was (but wrong because I do not have the same folder structure on the two machines).
When I right-clicked with Finder and examined the Package in the .dtBase2 file (folder), oddly, it looked as though most of the contents were actually there. But something in the whole process discombobulated DThink because it could not see them. The file size was also only 78MB instead of 98MB so obviously quite a few things did not make it over, either way.
The solution was the simple plain old sneakernet. I copied the .dtBase2 file onto a USB stick and then to the other machine. No permissions errors. Everything opened on the second machine just fine.
How soon are we likely to see v2.5?? - if it is in the TCO book already, it should not be too much longer. It would be nice to be able to sync more smoothly.
Ideally, it would be great if one could sync to some sort of cloud service, integrating the web access aspect of things, as can be done with Personal Brain. This works really well. It only syncs the deltas. It is still not a true multi-user database with full record locking, but that gets rather expensive to implement. The same kind of offline/online sync of deltas is what I’m hoping for in DThink v2.5
Thanks for sharing this experience (though it smells of a network hiccup). We can’t give firm times and dates (we’re not that foolhardy ) but it is in the works. Syncing is also coming along nicely, especially concerning direct-connection syncs like you were attempting manually.
It’s funny… I hate cloud services. I know some people absolutely love them (and I have to be familiar with and support them) but I like peer-to-peer, my machine to another machine. I don’t like my data on someone else’s server (as much as I can possibly avoid). /end rant
)