Yet more questions about Dropbox syncing.....

DEVONthink Tips
1

  1. If I set up syncing to my Dropbox account, is there a recoverable set of my documents on the Dropbox servers, should both my Macs and back ups get stolen?

  2. Is the answer to 1. the same if I have turned off syncing to the Dropbox/Apps folder to avoid having two copies on my computer?

  3. In a tutorial I have seen direct syncing to another computer set up at the same time as Dropbox syncing. Why would one do this? I have two Macs, an iPad and an iPhone. I need to sync to my Dropbox account so that DT to Go works, so don’t see a reason for direct syncing. Can the two methods exist in parallel?

Thanks very much for any replies.

2

1 - Yes you can import a “synced” database from DropBox to any Mac having DevonThink installed.

You have only to open “synchronize” and then to use the “import” function.

2 - Yes I suppose so. The only important thing is probably to have “synced” with Dropbox by the sync tool of DevonThink 2.5.

3 - If you sync (mirror is probably a better word) from iMac A to DropBox to iMac B, you will have bad upload times from iMac A to Dropbox and bad download times from DropBox to iMac B.

If you sync directly from iMac A to iMac B by your local network, it is going to be much more quicker.

For large databases with thousand of files and tens of RSS feeds, with a content of n X Gbytes, very often, in any case, as far as I have experimented, uploads to DropBox will fail at one moment or another.

So it’s perhaps better to forget about DropBox this time (I am also an happy customer of Dropbox with a 100 Gbytes capacity used).

3

Thanks for comprehensive and quick reply, Franck.

That all makes sense to me except your last sentence:

“So it’s perhaps better to forget about DropBox this time (I am also an happy customer of Dropbox with a 100 Gbytes capacity used).”

I need to sync to Dropbox so that the iPhone and iPad with DT To Go work, so not sure forgetting about Dropbox is an option.

My six databases total about 10Gb and I have fast internet. Initial import to the second mac was quite slow, but regular syncing speed is acceptable.

4

You are welcome! :smiley:

Of course, if you have a fast internet it’s different.
I have only an adsl 10 Mbytes/s internet on my side.

I would be interested to have some news about your DT synced life after some days of use, particularly regarding the easy of use of DT To Go that I don’t use until now.

5

Decent Internet here (50Mb down/25Mb up), and mirroring even a modest database with Dropbox was frustrating. The database is a little less than 200MB with 366 documents. Nothing really.

However, I had to brute force the first “sync” - it maybe took a dozen tries. I suspect that, once you get the first sync to work, it should be smoother sailing. I’ll post if the going does not improve.

UPDATE: Yep. A 30MB database took only two tries to get it on Dropbox.

6

I realise this is completely wrong…DDTG syncs to a computer on the same network not to the Dropbox account. Going to rethink my syncing strategy.