OF to store files, bad practice?
 

Hello. Usually people store their files in another app (evernote, devonthink, file folders on computer, etc.), but I've been liking creating inactive "file" folders/projects and storing documents and references there (I quite like the way OF stores and views attachments in the actions. Also nice to have everything in one place and easily searchable. Even having links in the notes section on actions as opposed to browser bookmarks is very convenient to file in OF). BUT I'm figuring OF wasn't built for this and might increase app size. Not sure if on the ipad/iphone/mac how external files are handled. Is it ok, or a bad idea to use OF this way? In theory if I continue doing this, there'd be a ton of attachments somehow stored in the program. What are some alternatives that might give a relatively seamless back and forth if this isn't a good practice?

If you have a large store of attachments, or you need to be able to edit those attachments, you'll quickly discover that OmniFocus wasn't built with this purpose in mind.

What some people do is use something like Dropbox or DevonThink as the storage facility, both of which will give you links to the material that can be embedded in OmniFocus and referenced from either iOS or OS X. Neither is quite ideal: Dropbox doesn't get you offline access to the data, and DevonThink doesn't give you read/write access to the data. Of course, you have those issues even if you don't entangle OmniFocus.

thanks for the reply... I agree to store files outside of OF (maybe only temp ones i need for an action that I can delete later). evernote has been pretty useful for me as well as dropbox.