I did provide the facts: I’ve a very reliable webdav server. I’ve about a quarter million objects in the database I want to sync. I’ve a Macbook, an iPad. I want the data that I have in my macbook in my DTP database to be reliably synched over to my iPad. To have it, well, “To Go.”
What’s missing?
I’ve tried using the webdav setup, but it appeared that it restarts synching every object when I re-open the app. I’ve found nowhere in the documentation that it should do that.
So the honest question is of course, is DTTG even made for something bigger, like hundreds of thousands of objects? Because if “it works for me” means that it synchronizes a couple hundred documents only, then no need to waste time with it.
As reported in this forum over and over Apple’s Cloud services unreliable and slow for many. Bonjour is considered the quickest and most reliable. I use Bonjour, WebDav on Synology NAS, and Dropbox. First sync takes time it takes. After that of course quicker with only the changes synced.
Well according to my Macbook / DTP, it has finished uploading to iCloud. And after that, the database did appear on the options in DTTG.
I’d ask that DTTP not just randomly crashes on the iPad now. When I restart it, it recommences synchronizing. Twice already (at least), the application just crashed.
OK I’ve now reduced the number of items to sync to like 25k.
DTTG keeps crashing at some random point, then when restarted, starts synching from the beginning.
I also wonder why it keeps re-synchronizing items that it probably already has. There should be an option for like “read only” items that never ever change.
12:30 - 14700 / 23778 - next crash
12:40 - 19770 / 23778 - next crash
12:48 - 18020 / 23778 - next crash. This time I was trying Bonjour
13:01 - 23200 / 23778 - next crash. Interestingly, I see a protocol which says no internet connection, and twice “database busy.”
What I’m also observing is that towards the very end, it keeps getting much slower.
13:11 - 23540 / 23778 - next crash.
13:12 - 5406 / 5406 (Bonjour) - complete. Now it’s running again through but doesn’t give an x/y number.
13:20 - During this run-through, yet another crash.
13:28 - And next crash… I’ll keep logging these so someone may note how much of a suffering DTTG really is.
13:35 - Crash.
13:51 - It finally went through. Now I see the number of items running up - I guest it now has the records locally and is importing them. At this point, it shows a progress bar, but not really how much is left to do in terms of number of records - similar to what was happening previously with the Bonjour sync.
Given that this kind of report is extremely rare, your assessment might be a bit off. And it might be more helpful to create a bug report from DTTG than posting crash times here – no one can do anything with those, since no one knows anything about your setup (what kind of network connection, what kind of hardware, what kind of records – all that.
Well, you seem to the sort that must “have it your way”. Oh well. Perhaps other apps do that. Dunno.
In DEVONthink ToGO, main screen, press on the “?” in a circle at bottom of screen. Pick “contact us” and your macOS device will create an email for you, and appending key details for DEVONthink Support to work with you.
It’s not the criticism. It’s the attitude. Describing and trying to solve a problem is one thing. Getting all worked up about it and only venting your frustration without providing any useful information (you’re in IT, aren’t you?) is something completely different.
There are a number of ways that you can expose your database from e.g. the MacBook to the iPad/iPhone
a) Bonjour → this somehow doesn’t consistently work, I sometimes get database busy or otherwise get that the host wasn’t reachable. I also had the reverse idea, i.e., why not actively “push” data to the iPad/iPhone whenever it changes. So I activated it on the iPhone; that then appeared under synchronization on the MacBook, but was greyed out, and I couldn’t even set the checkmark. Perhaps that goes only always in one direction.
b) iCloud → this seems to be working (except for the crashes, which have annoyed me to no end today, and I’ve opened some tickets and sent some crash logs). I think there are two stages to it: first, probably the “headers” are retrieved. During this process I had a bunch of crashes, but a counter would tell me x out of y having been copied. Only at the end of that process would I be able to actually use the database. Then, there is a setting “load files” which if you set it to “always” will lead to a second stage, where the actual content is downloaded; otherwise you’d have to initiate it every time.
c) WebDAV → I assume it works just the same as for iCloud, but haven’t activated it.
Some observations I have made:
All documents re-indexed on each refresh: This appears only to happen if the application crashes. Once they are there, it does not happen. So a normal process seems to be working sort of smoothly.
Random “triangle” errors: I keep getting “AsyncSocketErrorDomain 2” / “Attempt to connect to host timed out” for no obvious rason, and also “Database busy.” for Bonjour, sometimes.
It would be great having an actual button “sync now!” - Maybe tapping on the cloud icon does that, but I honestly don’t know - sometimes it just shows past errors. So I’m not really easily sure that I’m “up to date” on my iPad/iPhone.
Background refresh? It’d be great to have the application sit in the background and refresh itself automatically.
Long documents: Tapping on a 25MB document will make the application hang; I’ve had an email like that. In other words, watch out for the file size. It would ultimately come back, but take like a very long time for that.
So in general, it seems to be working. I’ve still to find a way to transfer large databases to it; my original idea was to transfer everything to those devices; I’ve significant amount of memory on both iPhone and iPad, so they can handle it. Bonjour may be the option here and then set those databases to never refresh automatically. If that means having them on iCloud or on Webdav, I don’t care about that duplication anymore, if at least it works.
2. Async 2 is usually caused by having Bonjour set up on more than one device. Database busy is typically because another device is already syncing via Bonjour.
3. As is the custom in Apple’s mobile OS, tap-drag down and release refreshes the view. In DEVONthink To Go’s case, it initiates a manual sync.
4. This is already in place and has been for a long time. But you misunderstand what is does. Background App Refresh is not controlled by the application. It’s controlled by the OS. The OS allows it to happen when it wants to and it also terminates that process after approx. 30 seconds. We can’t modify this behavior.
So what I am seeing now is that probably the way via iCloud or - so far now untested - WebDav will be preferrable. Once the bulk is synchronized, the synchronization appears to be smooth. With regards to background refresh, I recall there’s not a lot that can be done; but as it is going to be on iCloud, I can remember to do it every now and then.
The way I understand it, I can switch from iCloud to WebDav at some point, as the message IDs are probably what everything works by.
Now, here’s a workflow that I am currently using, and that actually works pretty well:
Mails come into Outlook, from different accounts.
One account is a locally running IMAP server, into which I move mails via a hotkey.
DTP fetches those mails via the process discussed here
In Todoist, I may want to have a task that references a mail. As the mail is in DTP by now, I can use Hookmark to create a link to it.
That Hook link works on the iPad, which is quite awesome. In other words, the Message IDs from DTP are working in DTTG, which allows for that workflow: In Todoist on the iPad (or the iPhone or the web app) I can click on those links inside a task comment, and it’ll open DTTG for me and jump right to that mail
Pfeww. So the final thing to do for me now is to import those big older databases.
Hopefully I’ll be able to work through them without constant crashes…
