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Sorry for the confusion and inconvenience here, folks. I just checked in with Ken about this. He's still investigating the problem, but here's his working theory:

In previous versions, folks sometimes needed to artifically force their database to compact. OmniFocus 1.7 introduced a change that should make it much less necessary to do that.

One way we've found to reliably cause the "Client with identifier <foo> only refers to identifiers that are not locally reachable" message is to turn off syncing on a Mac running 1.7.x, compact the database, then re-enable sync.

This creates a situation where there are client files on the server which refer to transactions which no longer exist on that Mac. That's what brings up the error message.

(Bill, we're going to look into the "restore from backup" angle and see if that can cause this, as well.)

Once this happens, there are 2 ways to restore sync. Which one you need to use will depend on which database contains the most up-to-date info.

If the database on the Mac that's showing the error is the most up to date, you want to cancel the sync, then select "Replace Server Database" from the File menu. This circumvents the sync process and just pushes the entire database on the Mac up to the server.

If the server database is most up to date, you want to cancel sync & quit OmniFocus, then open up ~/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus in the Finder. Rename "OmniFocus.ofocus" to "OLD-OmniFocus.ofocus". Restart OmniFocus; it will pull down the server database and replace the one you moved aside.

Once things are back up and running, the new best practice would be to let OmniFocus do the compacting for you. The change we made really should make it unnecessary to compact manually. Once all my Macs were running 1.7.x, the number of zip files in my database went from a hundred or so to less than 20...

In any case, that should prevent this from happening until we can research the problem more fully and make any necessary changes.

If folks are sure they haven't compacted their databases manually before seeing this, or if the steps above don't get things sorted out, it would be really helpful if they could send as much information as possible about their setup to the support ninjas so we can help.

Useful information includes things like the number of devices being synced, what version of OmniFocus is installed on each of them, and what OS each has installed.

Last edited by Brian; 2009-09-02 at 02:18 PM.. Reason: correct typo