Hi all,
I wanted to share some of my thoughts and experiences around how DEVONthink does sync and the approach that finally works for me.
To give you some background, I’ve been developing software since the 1980s, and leading large software teams for the past decade. My current team is about 1000 software developers. I consider myself, rightly or wrongly, a software expert, and I have done deep work on various distributed systems in telco and eCommerce environments. I’m opinionated, and I’m frustrated with DEVONthink.
I have been using DEVONthink for almost exactly three years, and it is a foundational part of, well, my life. I’ve gone completely paperless, all my main gets scanned when it comes in the door (I got a Brother MFC-9342CDW duplex printer/duplex scanner to support this), and I’m running DT3 on three different MacBooks, two iPhones, and 1 iPad. I have built up an extensive professional library. Almost everything I read gets converted to PDF and put into DT3. I’ve become more disciplined about tagging and smarter about how to organize things, and it provides enormous value in both my personal and my work life. DT3 is an essential tool.
Unfortunately, the sync is hugely unreliable. I realized that I am spending >40 hours/year, minimum, making sure that sync is working, and fixing problems when it doesn’t.
My conclusion is this: Dropbox sync doesn’t work, iCloud sync requires a second local copy of the data, and MyCloud doesn’t seem like a very trustworthy vendor.
Christian (CTO) has been super helpful working with me to try to diagnose Dropbox, but it seems clear to me that Dropbox is just not up to the task for the scale at which I’m using DT. Furthermore, it appears that DT does not use the full Dropbox feature set (which is rather git-like, and, for example, able to compare hashes to avoid sending files over the wire). Whatever it’s doing (treating it like WebDav, I guess), Dropbox doesn’t support well?
So, what is the committed DT user to do? I think I finally found something that works. It’s early days, but it already feels more reliable and also faster than Dropbox (which has been my primary sync tool from the beginning). What I did was the following:
- Got a Synology DS718+ NAS with 8TB
- Enabled WebDav
- Used the Synology DDNS feature so I can have an I can access from outside the house
- Added it as a sync
- Converted everything to it
What can I say? So far (2 days later), it is already working much better than Dropbox. My ambient stress levels are down. When I’m at home, it about 10x faster than syncing externally, and, more importantly, it syncs without timeouts. So far, the various Dropbox failure modes (like, files can’t be downloaded, or files added to DTTG don’t end up in Dropbox, or DT3 gets “stuck” syncing) have stopped happening.
Now I have a new problem, which is that the NAS is currently not backed up (though it’s RAID 10 and external backup is possible with Synology).
Anyhow – bottom line, I wish someone had spelled this out for me. If you are frustrated with the sync options, it seems like WebDav is a lot better than the cloud options. Curious if this is well known, and I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this.
Christian - I appreciate all the support you gave me. I’d be happy to try again with Dropbox if there is a breakthrough! And like I said, I am a committed and enthusiastic customer. But for all the positives of DT3, the sync has got me down.
- Eric