[brab]

Hello,

I had a strange thing happen today: I had a message saying that a client had not synchronized for a long time. As both computers are always online and in sync, I was surprised. So I pulled up the client list and I discovered something strange: there was one synchronization by this client, top, which was stale, and the recent synchronization was by the other machine, charm. The surprising thing was that it was said that "charm" was "this computer". I unregistered the stale client, and did a sync. After pulling up again the client list, I now had a correct "top (this computer)". But now the other computer (charm) also says "top (this computer)" in the client list.

I guess somehow the two machines are confused and think they are the same. I tried unregistering it and synchronizing again, but I only get one client after both machines are synchronized.

Is this normal? How can I fix it?

PS: the iPhone is also registered and is displayed as expected.

[Lizard]

This sounds like a bug we noticed recently. I'll guess you copied your preferences from one computer to the other at some point. We're working on a solution.

[brab]

Yes, I used to synchronize by copying both my data and preferences.

Is there a way to manually edit the preferences of one of the computer to fix this?

[Lizard]

[I'm only posting this so you get an answer before Monday. I'd really like someone to post better/simpler instructions.]

I'm out of town at the moment, so I can't try this, but it ought to work:

1) Make sure all your OmniFocus data has been synced to one Mac.
2) Make sure you have a current backup of your OmniFocus data, and make a copy of your preferences file on each Mac just in case something goes wrong.*
3) Move, rename, or delete the OmniFocus data on your WebDAV server.
4) On each computer, open up com.omnigroup.OmniFocus.plist and delete the SyncClientIdentifier item.
5) Launch OmniFocus on each Mac and sync it, starting with the Mac that you're sure has all your data (see step 1).
6) If you get a "use client or server" dialog on any computer or iPhone after the first Mac, choose "server"

*I'm really serious about this, because I haven't tested this procedure.

[brab]

Unfortunately it did not work: the "SyncClientIdentifier" was recreated on both computers after the first sync (as expected), but it's still the same on both computers. I don't know which data it uses to compute it, but it must be the same data.

[Lizard]

I talked to the engineers after posting that. There's a missing step. In step 5, after launching and before syncing, turn syncing off and back on again.

[brab]

It finally worked! The trick was slightly different:
- before quitting OF, shut down synchronization (doing it after changing the preference file does not work, it seems that the sync id comes back as soon as OF is started, and turning off sync then does not remove it).

- After shutting down sync and quitting OF, remove the sync id in the preference file

- Start everything again and sync in the order you suggested.

Thanks for the help!

[brab]

This happened again to me: it seems that everything worked for 24h and the computers went back to being confused and thinking they were the same.

I just did the procedure again, and everything seems to be back to normal. I'll update later to say if this worked this time or if it failed again after a while.