Quote:
Originally Posted by GrumpyDave
You can be defensive about it all you want but that doesn't change the fact that letting backups pile up indefinitely with no provision for maintaining them was just plain lazy coding and/or poor design on someone's part. I'd even say it's irresponsible to treat their customer's systems that way. To not have addressed it in over two years and multiple updates is just baffling to me. To be clear, though, I'm thrilled that OmniGroup did think about backups and that they decided to be safe and back up as often as they do. It just gets my panties in a bunch when decisions are made to generate never ending piles of data without any regard for maintenance and retention.
|
I'm not defensive about it at all. It wasn't my call not to put in a pruner. There are many, many things I would rather see them spend their time on before this, however. Everyone has all the tools they need to delete backups that are no longer needed, but most users do not have the option of changing the behavior of the application in any substantial way. Given the choice between fixing something I can deal with myself and fixing something that only someone with source access can fix, I would prefer they do the latter.
Quote:
|
3.5GB of backups for a 5MB file? And you seriously don't see any problem with that?
|
No, I don't see a problem with it. It isn't one 5 MB file, it is 500 different 5 MB files (actually, mine average about 7 MB). It's an inconsequential amount of disk space for me, and when it becomes consequential, I spend 30 seconds in the Finder and vaporize a bunch of them. Geez, my camera's RAW files occupy 40 MB each, and those I store in triplicate. It's not like OmniFocus suddenly starts doing this without warning, either, unlike some of the messages that get blurted out to the console log with little or no rate-limiting.
Quote:
To use your numbers of 50MB per day that's 18GB per year with no warning whatsoever from the vendor. Just look through the threads and you see that most people discovered the excessive backups by accident when they were looking to free up space. Contrary to your declaration that it isn't a problem for most people, it IS a problem for EVERYBODY. Each and every customer has to do their own research to find out, 1) what are these files, 2) can they safely be removed, and 3) how best to remove them. I have the skills to automate the cleanup with a simple script, but not everyone does. It's silly that people are expected to use an external tool like Hazel just for this function.
|
Did you ever read the documentation?
Backing up your database, p. 50:
We've made OmniFocus err on the side of obsessive, paranoid data preservation, just in case something bad happens to your database.
The preferences have a big section on the front page devoted to backups, and no mention of pruning. I'm not sure why one would jump to the assumption that any program that makes backups automatically prunes them for you if nothing is said, especially a program that "errs on the side of obsessive, paranoid data preservation" but no matter. You still have to monitor free disk space on your computer whether OmniFocus prunes the backups or not.
Easy, no-cost solution while you wait for a built-in pruning facility: make a repeating action that goes off once a month and reminds you to delete some old backups of your choosing. There is no need for a script to just delete the oldest files in a directory. Given the bare-bones nature of the Archive facility, I very much doubt a built-in backup pruner is going to offer much customization.
A long-ago colleague was fond of pointing out whenever a computer did something unfortunate while trying to help (such as pruning backups) that the problem with programs that try to wipe your nose for you is that they often first wipe something else. The beauty of being a beneficiary of Kryder's Law is that it is no longer nearly so necessary to sweat over small amounts of storage, and the Omni developers can concentrate on what they do best. OmniDiskSweeper is a fine tool, but it's not why we are all here!