Been away from DTPO for awhile and now returning. Have a synching question.
Want to have all my devices in synch.
What is best practices for my situation:
Main laptop (use 70% of time) home and office.
Secondary laptop (only home)
iPhone.
My instinct is to store databases on main laptop and create synch stores on each of the other two devices.
I’m assuming that is a better solution than to use an external drive or my Synology NAS.
I had synch stores set up before and they worked well but I have databases all over my devices and need to reconfigure.
This wouldn’t work as mobile devices don’t support Local syncStores.
One thing to be clear about: Each device is going to have a local copy of the database(s). This is non-negotiable and part of the ecosystem. You aren’t going to have your databases on the “main laptop” and have your mobile device accessing those databases.
If you want to move all the databases to your main laptop, thats fine - and likely a good idea. Your other machines will still keep a copy but you will be Syncing to a commonly accessible location to keep them in the same state. You could use a Bonjour connection when devices are on the same network. You could use a supported cloud service (Dropbox, Box, CloudMe). For example, you could have the mobile device and the laptops Syncing to CloudMe in case you’re in a location that disallows Bonjour traffic. Or you could use a Bonjour connection between the mobile device and laptops to keep your data off anyone else’s servers.
Those are things you’ll have to consider.
If you have Bonjour AND cloud synching enabled as you described, how do you keep them from interfering with each other. Manually?
Also, is there any appreciable difference in speed, reliability among the various cloud services or web dav. Was thinking of using web dav on my NAS.
I’m not sure what the concern is here. Sync takes care of its own connections and operations.
Speed is next to impossible to answer as your network, whatever’s going on in the hops between you and a remote server, slow / unresponsive servers or bandwidth management techniques employed by cloud services, etc. all come into play.
My experience:
I have found CloudMe to be reliable.
Box and Dropbox have been less so lately.
WebDAV has to be configured properly, especially for Internet access, but it can be usable. Again, network conditions are a limiting factor with any remote Sync location.
Thanks for your help.
Played around with Bonjour and cloud synching this evening. I think I finally grasp everything.
I’ll probably keep all my databases on my main laptop and Bonjour to my home laptop.
Then Dropbox synch to my phone. Looked at CloudMe but don’t want to pay for another service. I already pay for Dropbox and have quite a bit of free space.
Great product. Love it.