[tomben]

When you have to choose which copy to use, that means things have gone wrong, and the syncing isn't working. I've had it happen a couple of times and sent in a bug report.

Here's why it can be bad; imagine this timeline:

1:00 pm - computer, server, iphone in sync. (Computer has data set A, serve has data set A, iPhone has data set A.)

2:00 pm - computer content updated, and synced to server. (Computer has data set B, server has dataset B, iPhone has dataset A.)

3:00 pm - iphone content updated, but not synced.(Computer has data set B, server has dataset B, iPhone has dataset C.)

4:00 pm - iphone sync attempted and fails. Now you have to choose between keeping the changes you made on the iphone (Dataset C) OR grabbing the copy off the server which has different changes in it (Dataset B).

You can only chose one to keep, so you are going to lose data. You lose either the changes between A and B *or* the changes between A and C.

This is a classic data syncing problem, and I haven't really even looked at how OF tries to fix it. The example is also a worst case scenario. If you haven't made changes on the iPhone for example, then you know you can safely pull from the server, etc. And I haven't tried it across multiple computeres, so I'll leave those details for someone else. =)