Quote:
Originally Posted by Xeri
Wait, WHAT? Did you just say that OmniFocus is being changed so that it will automatically drop the unsynced client and force me to lose any local changes on it without even asking me?
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Yes, OmniFocus will automatically drop devices which haven't synchronized in three weeks—but no, that doesn't lose the data on those devices!
When you next attempt to synchronize a dropped device, you'll be asked whether you wish to replace its database with the current server copy. You can cancel the sync at that point and look at its local database before deciding whether to replace it. (To easily review recent edits, I recommend using a context-mode "Recent Changes" perspective that groups and sorts all items by their Changed date.)
If you do elect to replace a local database with the server copy, OmniFocus for Mac will make a backup of your old local database just in case you realize later that you missed something. (You'll find it named something like "OmniFocus Prior To Resynchronizing on [date]".) OmniFocus for iPhone can't do this automatic backup (because it doesn't have any mechanism for accessing alternate databases the way the Mac app does), but you can always
email your database to yourself and open it on your Mac.
Finally, I should point out that OmniFocus tries to automatically sync local changes to the server within one minute, so in my experience it's uncommon for out-of-sync devices to have any local changes. (They're generally just out of date!) But if they do have some local changes (perhaps they were offline while those changes were made and haven't been synced since), please rest assured that those changes
will not be dropped without warning. (That would be antithetical to the notion of a trusted system!)
(The next step I'd like to take is to have OmniFocus automatically determine whether any local changes have been made. If there are no local changes, OmniFocus doesn't need to prompt about whether to replace the local database or not—it can just do it. And if there
are local changes, perhaps OmniFocus could automatically reapply those changes after it gets back in sync.)