[kongjie]

OK, this is a "just wondering" sort of question.

I transfer my OF file (OmniFocus.ofocus) onto my iDisk so I can manually sync it with my home file.

I do the transfer with Transmit.

It takes an inordinate amount of time for the file to transfer, considering it is only 600k or so. I notice that each xml doc in the package transfers individually and I'm assuming this is what slows it down.

For comparison, a 62-item folder with 67 mb of Word, .pdf and InDesign docs transfers faster than the OF file. So, what's up with that? Is it that there are 1200 "documents" in the OF package?

[Tim Wood]

Each change to an OF file gets written as a transaction file. This means that we can quickly save your data in a non-proprietary & stable format and it also means that we only write out the actual differences. This is nice for Time Machine, for example.

However, for slow filesystems this can be a speed penalty for things like scanning the list of transactions. We'll eventually be compacting these transactions automatically, but you can use the File > Rebuild… menu to do this yourself occasionally, if you run into this sort of slowness.

[ptone]

Why not zip it before doing the upload?

-P

[kongjie]

Originally Posted by ptone

Why not zip it before doing the upload?

-P

That's the easy solution, except that it requires another step to a process that I wish was automatic in the first place.

Actually it adds 3 steps, because I would have to zip, transfer and then delete the zipped file on my work computer, then unzip the file on my home computer.

I guess the short-term answer is to write an Applescript to automate some of the process.

[Ken Case]

If you transfer the file using something that does incremental updates (like rsync), it will be much, much faster because it only has to send the transactions that aren't already present on the other end. (We never change existing transactions, we only add new ones.)