OmniFocus is too draconian about backup and synching
 

I use an external hard drive for backups, but whenever my laptop is disconnected, I get periodic notifications from OmniFocus, “The backup volume could not be found.” And whenever I haven’t synched with my iPod in a few days (I do most of my work on the desktop), I get a notification, “You haven’t synched this client in a while,”*with the default option to stop synching.

Is this really necessary? Do we need warnings that can’t be disabled or easily dismissed? Maybe OF could warn if I haven’t backed up in a few days, instead of a warning every time the backup fails. And with synchronization, I either have to open the Preferences, or click the button to turn off synching altogether. There is no easy option to say, “Yes, I know I haven’t synched in a while.”

I understand that people want to keep their data secure, but I think that multiple warnings a day are too much, especially ones that can’t be easily dismissed.

The backup warning I agree is maybe not that necessary.

The sync warning is actually important. If you have a client that you don't sync often, it will make syncs on the iPhone SIGNIFICANTLY slower going forward, until all clients have been synced, due to the architecture. I suspect if that nag dialog is removed, then in 2 weeks when an iPhone sync takes 30 minutes you (or other users) will be complaining about THAT.

I'd say, if you have clients you rarely if every use, disable sync from them.

Why not just do a once-a-day backup to your local disk? Throw out the old ones once a month or so. Unless you've got a big database, that's less space than the application binary occupies.

You can control the warnings about stale sync clients with the techniques in Ken's post [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=55140&postcount=10"]here[/URL].

The only way you should be getting multiple warnings a day from one machine is if you have it set to back up multiple times a day, and/or have changed the sync parameters mentioned in Ken's post. If you don't care enough about your data to back up to an ever-present drive, why all the backup attempts?

abates17,

I concur with your thoughts on the backup warning messages. As always, use Help → Send Feedback to submit suggestions to get them entered in the development database. (See [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3734"]this sticky thread[/URL] at the top of the forum for details.)

I also use external drives to backup, one at home and one at work with my MBP traveling between them. My strategy is to let OF backup to the local drive, then use SuperDuper to regularly and automatically clone the MBP drive to the external drive. I also have Time Machine backing up to another partition.

Cheers,

Curt

Hm. Old thread, but i wanted to take the opportunity to ask whether it is possible to somehow lower the sync warning frequency. I simply don't start Omnifocus on the iPhone that often and the number of my entries is low enough that any sync won't take very long. Something like a scheduled sync service for the iPhone would be great that automatically takes care of this, but i guess iPhone OS doesn't offer something like this?

As mentioned earlier in the thread, you can control the sync behavior with the techniques described [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=55140&postcount=10"]here[/URL].