OmniFocus and Time Machine Backups
 

Recently, there's been some discussion on the Yojimbo mailing list about having to quit that app before running a Time Machine backup (or set Time Machine to ignore the Yojimbo database all together). Presumably, this helps prevent corruption of the database. I guess Yojimbo suffers from the same limitations that Aperture did before its recent update.

Anyway, I just wanted to verify if it's OK to let Time Machine backup the OmniFocus database while the OmniFocus application is still running. Anyone know if it's safe?

I have not had any problems with it personally, but I also have not tried reverting to a time-machine-generated back-up of OmniFocus. I'm gonna ask around and maybe do a little testing to find out what the deal is.

My current (slightly paranoid) suggestion would be to exclude the active database from Time Machine backups, but make sure to include your Focus backups in the Time Machine backups. Not so much because Time Machine might scramble the live version of the data, but because Time Machine might make a copy of the file when Focus is sort of in the middle of writing something, so if you tried to restore from that backup, it would just give you errors, instead of your data.

After consulting with an engineer, it turns out that the Core Data part of OmniFocus is stored in ~/Library/Caches, which Time Machine skips over automatically. So turning off archiving of the active database should be unnecessary because that's just XML, not Core Data.

Ah, very good. Thanks for the follow-up, Lizard.