syncing to Box

DEVONthink Tips
1

I wanted to take a minute to share my current setup but also to see if anyone has any suggestions on how I might improve it. Like many other people over the past six months, I took advantage of the offer from Box (http://www.box.com) for 50 GB of free storage by activating an account on a specific device (in my case, an HP webOS Touchpad). I have given the company a great deal of feedback on one particularly bizarre limitation: the 50 GB account is a free personal account and therefore does not have a sync solution, and the only option is to “upgrade” to an enterprise account with sync but with a monthly fee and 20 GB of storage! To date, there remains no supported way to sync large amounts of data to that large amount of storage easily. So like many others, I found myself with 50GB of free storage on Box and no idea what to do with it.

I decided to use it to backup my DTPO data and to be able to access it easily on my phone or tablet. While they offer no official sync program for personal accounts, it turns out that you can access it via webDAV. So I currently have Super Flexible File Synchronizer (http://www.superflexible.com) to keep files.noindex and all of its subdirectories mirrored to Box. This seemed like the easiest way to get all of my data uploaded. Since the Box app on my phone and tablet has search, I never have to navigate the actual file structure. So I often markup a pdf in Preview on my MacBook before heading to class where I can quickly download the recently updated version of that file and view it on my tablet. What do people think? Is this a decent way of doing it? Its not elegant, but it seems to be working at least insofar as it allows me to access my data on all of my devices. I don’t know how well it would work as a backup if I had a HDD crash and needed to rebuild my databases from the cloud. Thoughts?

Finally, the only hiccup in the synchronization process at the moment is that Box doesn’t allow folders named /*/ and DTPO seems to like to make those. So for the moment the sync software just skips those folders and gives an error.

So that is my current method, and perhaps it will help out some other people who happen to have 50 GB of useless cloud storage from Box get access to their materials on multiple devices. I also anticipate that there are many problems with the system, I basically through it together mid-semester as a stopgap measure. With summer coming I thought it might be time to consider how I might make the system work better.

2

Thanks for this. Had to log in and create a folder, and then look elsewhere for the path - turns out there is a // in the webdav path just before the final folder. Also the webdav address is still box.net, but secure https:.

3

Right, I guess I never actually said how to set it up as a webDAV account.
login credentials: the same as the Box website
URL: box.net/
folder: “/dav/YourFolderNameHere/” (in my setup, that means that my DatabaseName.dtbase2 becomes /dav/DatabaseName/ in order to upload all of its contents and subdirectories)

The other thing I have done is set it up so that it does real time tracking of the left side (local) and mirrors that to the right side (Box) and not the other way around, so if somehow I deleted/changed a file or folder in Box, it would re-upload that file or folder from my local HDD rather than change the files in the local database.

4

So with this morning’s release of DTPO 2.3.4 is this post now obsolete? I think that this update is supposed to bring syncing via webDAV to DTPO itself, but I cannot figure out how to set it up. Anyone know?

5

Backing up files.noindex might preserve your documents (and give you access on remote devices), but it’s not a strategy for rebuilding databases. All the other contents of the database package are needed too. Without them, you’d end up with a kind of Frankenstein database, without groups, tags, labels, etc., and you’d need to go through the really, really painful process of reverse engineering the contents of files.noindex into something like the group structure you had. If you are synchronizing both ways - from your database to Box and back - then you’re also at risk of rendering your database usuasble.

6

I wondered if syncing files.noindex would present that problem. As I said, this was a stopgap to try to do three things (in order):

  1. backup my data
  2. make that data accessible on multiple devices
  3. backup the database itself

So what would be the best way to backup the whole database to a webDAV account while still keeping the files accessible on other devices. By the way, I made sure to set up the sync software so that it mirrors the database to Box rather than moving in both directions to protect the local database.