Bonjour Sync Problem
 

Hello,

My Bonjour syncing was working totally fine, but now I seem to have a problem. I'm not quite sure exactly how it happened, but laptop crashed recently, so maybe something to do with not shutting down properly.

Anyway, the problem is that when I boot OmniFocus I get the message "Cannot start synchronization server. Failed to stop previously running server." When I try to sync, I'm told that "Your OminFocus database is not set up to synchronize with a server. Would you like to set it up now?" - so then I go to Sync Prefs and try...

When I try to set a password to use, it doesn't work (not about wrong password, just gives boing sound. If I select "Sync with nothing" then go to "Bonjour" to reset the sync database, it just tells me the original message about "Cannot start synchronization server. Failed to stop previously running server."

I suppose fundamentally I need to shut down the old server - how do I do this??

Thanks, Taman

Well, a reboot should do it, but since your machine crashed that would have (rather forcefully) shut down the server. You might try turning off syncing, rebooting again just in case, and then trying to turn back on syncing. If that doesn't work then I think most likely there's something else that is the problem - a corrupted configuration file or something, in which case I would suggest contacting our support team via the Send Feedback item in the Help menu.

And the answer is...
 

If would have nice if someone had posted this, but I didn't have time to contact support and find out what they said. It's pretty clear that the problem is a lock file that got left around. A proper system would notice that it was stale (it's not going to take an hour to synchronize) and see if it was really locked, but that doesn't seem to be happening here.

Quit OmniFocus.
Go to ~/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/Synchronization Data/Run
Move the contents of that folder to the trash.
Restart OmniFocus

Mine was happily back to where it should be, hopefully yours will be too.

This worked fine for me. It would be nice if Omni would have a user-friendlier way to resolve this problem, though.