Is it okay to take a backup and replace my main OmniFocus database with it? Database backups contain only 1 xml file which make idisk syncing much faster.

Also, is there any way to make omnifocus always use one xml file instead of making hundreds?

[Tim Wood]

This a backup file to replace your current database perfectly OK (make sure you copy instead of moving it). In fact, this is exactly what OmniFocus does when you select File > Revert to Database Backup…

You can merge all the transactions into one via the File > Rebuild Database… menu. In the future, we hope to make transaction coalescing more automatic, but this didn't make it into 1.0 early enough (this would be a potentially destabilizing change and there is a workaround, if a little manual & hokey).

[Toadling]

So does that mean we probably won't see this "auto coalescence" in the 1.0 release in January?

[Tim Wood]

Definitely not for 1.0. This is something that would be nice to have, but not nice enough to warrant any data loss via instability. We'd do our best to make sure there wasn't any anyway, but updating the filesystem atomically is tricky in this case and I'm not a big fan of "tricky" for the next couple weeks... =)

The data coalescing really will likely tie into how ever we sync with changes on the iPhone, so it may be good that we haven't committed to an approach already (just an OmniGraffle description of how it would work, were we to actually type out the code).