Zero byte files

DEVONthink
1

Hello,

after upgrading to DTTG 3 I’ve had several issues with corrupted files / database.
Some time later my DT on iMac also complained a corrupted database (in addition I’ve had 2 power crashes, so I don’t know if its related to DTTG). I haven’t followed all in details as I had other stuff to focus on - so perhaps the problems are not related to each other.

However, I took the journey of resolving the sync and corrupted database problems yesterday and I want to understand what was going on there.

  1. I’ve identified the zero byte files on my iMac.
    I did some research in my time machine and these files seem to be zero bytes since several years. But my MacBook also holds the same zero byte files and never complained about that. Why is that a problem only now and only on one device ?

  2. As mentioned I’ve had some sync issues as well - the error was “forbidden” on all my MacOS and iOS devices. I turned out that the path had a wrong case sensitive character.
    I am syncing to my Synology webdav and this was working for severals years without any changes. I can’t find any corresponding change in the latest webdav release so I wonder if there might have been changes in DT that it suddenly has a case sensitive problem.

  3. To get the sync finally running again I needed to delete the zero byte files AND empty them from the trash.
    Here we are again: Following some older forum topics I really wished I din’t need to empty my whole trash for this step but only the corrupted files involved.

regards
Andreas

2

Re. your point 1, see here.

Re. 2: I don’t know.

Re. 3: The trash is synced too, so (in this specific case) it makes sense to me that potentially damaging files will prohibit sync; the point of trash being that you can still recover what is in the trash.

3

  1. This has always been the case with WebDAV URLs. The server name isn’t case-sensitive, but the path of the URL is, e.g., mysync is not mySync.

  2. We strongly suggest you don’t use the Trash as a filing cabinet, instead emptying it often.
    Also you can open the Trashes and empty the Trash specific databases as needed.