OF Database vs. Backup
 

I was wondering why my OF database is 10.5 MB in size whereas the backup is only 16 KB? Currently for a daily backup of my OF data I copy the database to a USB drive. The size of the database seems a little large for my data whereas the size of the backup file seems more in line with a realistic size for my data.

Which leads to my next question, what is the advantage of copying my OF database file to my USB drive as a backup versus copying the last backup of my OF data which is created every time I quit the program?

Have you tried rebuilding your database?

File -> Rebuild Database...

Your database (.ofocus file) contains an xml file for every transaction (edit) you've made. I'm sure there are all sorts of uses for this including syncing, time machine, undos etc.

When you rebuild, these are all consolidated into a single xml file representing just your current data.

I was also surprised to see just how much the .ofocus bundle could swell.

-P

Thank you Toadling and ptone. I had a problem with my database file yesterday. It happened after I opened a couple of smaller backup files from last month when it was still in the double KB size range. Then I re-opened the current database and it had become corrupt. So I close OF and opened a backup from earlier yesterday. It went through some 'actions' that I had never seen it go through before. I closed OF again, and checked the now current database. It was back into the double to low triple digit KB range. After this I did find the option to rebuild the database which I did after backing the now smaller, but 'good' database.

Does this mean that we need to periodically rebuild the database to keep it from getting too large? Or will OF occasionally do a rebuild on its own? I noticed my database (.ofocus file) had grown to "19 MB on disk (264,474 bytes)", but then a rebuild took it down to "832 KB (18,664 bytes)", using the Finder's Get Info command. After a rebuild, it takes me about 10 days to get back up in the >10 MB size range.

I suspect that these ballooning file sizes are what made transfers to my .Mac iDisk so slow; I'm now using a USB flash drive to carry the file between machines.

Based on comments from Omni in a [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=6072"]previous thread[/URL], it sounds like this is strictly a manual procedure for OmniFocus 1.0. However, there may be plans to automate transaction coalescence in the future, perhaps with a tie-in to iPhone syncing.

I simply make it a habit to rebuild my database every couple days or after I've added a lot of stuff or made big changes. I then immediately follow that with a manually-triggered database backup, which can be found under the same menu item.

I hope OF is built on a platform that can handle tens of thousands of projects and hundreds of thousands of tasks. My life is complicated and I want a good history.

BZ

[QUOTE=BwanaZulia;31790]I hope OF is built on a platform that can handle tens of thousands of projects and hundreds of thousands of tasks. My life is complicated and I want a good history.

BZ[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I hope so too. I really don't want to have to start deleting things as my database grows.

I had the opportunity to try out OmniFocus on my wife's machine the other day and was impressed with how snappy the app felt with a near-empty database compared to my 70+ screen pages of data with all projects and all actions shown (we both have MacBook Pros, so hardware was virtually the same).

I wouldn't go so far as to say mine feels sluggish, but there's definitely been a degradation in performance as I've added more stuff (which is to be expected, I guess). I just hope Omni has taken this into account and is prepared to handle huge databases.

I have a ton in there, but will try rebuilding the database to see if that helps.

BZ

I don't understand is what causes the OF database to grow so large. If I am in the context view and show everything, I have around 10 screens of items. Since my first posts I have learned that I need to periodically filter OF to show just my completed items, select all of them, and then delete them. If I just do this my database still keeps growing. In my case it went from 16 KB to 980 KB in just 5 days, even though I was deleting completed tasks and really was not adding any additional tasks. By this I mean that over this time, if I added 15 new non-recurring tasks I would have deleted 15 old non-recurring tasks.

After reading the above posts and doing a rebuild I am now back to 16 KB. I don't believe that the coders at OmniGroup would intentionally write bloat code, and am hoping that they will continue to update this release of OF and address this issue. I believe that a great course of action would be to give us the option to purge and delete completed tasks and rebuilt the database automatically. I would make these separate functions for those individuals who do not want to purge completed tasks. Until that happens I will schedule a recurring ToDo to do these tasks.