What is the default behavior regarding deleting and syncing?

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hello,

I just noticed the following behaviour, which I find very frustrating:

I’m using one database on my main mac and one on my mobile mac. They sync via a local sync store. I set up my database, imported the bunch of still unsorted stuff of 1.000 scans into it and synced, with the result, that my mobile mac got all documents when it synced. Good.

Over the week I worked on my main mac and converted all PDFs to PDF+Text (with the option to delete the original). I emptied the trash. I synced everything back to the sync store. Then I synced the mobile Mac. The mobile Mac got all converted PDFs, but also sent all originals back to the sync store (where, of course, the other Mac fetched them again creating duplicated I had to sort out by hand).

Therefore my question:

What is the default behavior regarding deleting files and syncing of a sync store?

What I expected: Delete on 1 system deletes on every system and they never come back.

Bye,
Oliver

2

Great, now I have the problem with a second database. The mobile Mac synced deleted articles back over the sync store into my main mac. I removed the articles on the main mac and synced with the store. I then synced the mobile Mac with the store. Instead of getting the information, that the items have been removed, the mobile Mac puts them again into the store.

How should I deal with this?

3

I believe the key thing with syncing is to NOT empty trash before syncing, or the deleted items will be sync’d back to the “master”.

If you delete lots of stuff on the master, sync while the deleted items are in the trash, then empty trash, then sync again.

The above is based on my experience with DTTG where if I don’t do the above, my iPad and iPhone put all the deleted stuff back in my Mac.

4

Ok, this seems to work, but obviously isn’t not very useful when you are working with four Macs and have to think about how to delete stuff, so that it won’t come back.

I also noted that DTTG will sync stuff back into the inbox which you already moved to another location. So in its current state, DTTG renders the whole thing useless.

5

What you are experiencing should not happen. With that said, a lot of things can happen with sync that should not happen. Sync is working but I would say it is not refined. As an example, it is still obtrusive and not transparent. Sync that is more or less real time would avoid a lot of sync issues. In your case, I have seen the behaviour. The only person that can answer this is the engineer who wrote the sync code.

I would say this as a way of trying to do anything you can to avoid sync problems.

  1. Sync frequently
  2. If you leave a machine to go to another machine sync before you leave the machine and then sync when you get to the other machine ensuring you’ve left enough time for the sync process to occur on the first machine
  3. Be very careful with sync if you use DTTG as this is extremely problematic and if you add this WIFI based sync into the say Dropbox sync of Mac to Macs unfortunately the variability factor changes t the degree its hard to isolate where problems are emanating
  4. Ensure DTTG does not generate bad records to your DEVONthink DB as it will and these records will be of the form a note header with nothing inside the field of the note and it can easily slip by your purview. Once in the primary DB sync can and will get messed up
  5. Sync frequently from all devices including IOS devices but in a logical and orderly fashion. Sync is very finicky at this stage.
6

I now removed DTTG because the app. well. … :wink:

So I now have three Macs left. All sync against the same local storage on a NAS. As far as I do not empty the trash it seems to work. I sync my main Macs on a daily basis and the third one once a week (this third one does not create content).