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Restoring from Backup provides a speed boost? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
For reasons I won't go into here, I restored my OF database from a backup (OF Feature) which was pretty scary with over 2,300 tasks, but all went well, and OMNI should be applauded for including such a worthwhile feature.

After restoring the backup, and then syncing, I was asked if I wanted to use the local or server copy, which I expected and then it took a while to replace my document on MobileMe with the new local copy.

Then I synced another computer, same question, this time I answered to keep server copy, and finally my iPhone.

Now, it is unbelievable how fast the iPhone document loads and syncs. I'm wondering why (not complaining) it is so much faster that before the restore. I have made a habit of syning both computers and iPhone before bed each night. Any insights??? Thanks, John
 
If I remember correctly, restoring from backup also clears out the various client files in the sync database, so the database compacts down to one transaction file.

Explanation:
Your database has one action. You add actions B and C. You change action A, and then delete it. While you're syncing, your database would look like this:
<Start with A>
<add B>
<add C>
<change A>
<delete A>

After you revert, instead of storing each step, we compact everything and just store the end state. Smaller and less work, but as you saw, puts you in the position of picking one or the other database to win out. You can't merge transactions from various sources any more.
 
Thanks for the explanation Brian. Might be a good thing to do periodically after making sure everything is synced, and then restore on one machine, update MobileMe and then update the others from MobileMe. John
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbkendrick View Post
Thanks for the explanation Brian. Might be a good thing to do periodically after making sure everything is synced, and then restore on one machine, update MobileMe and then update the others from MobileMe.
John,

My understanding is that you get similar speed improvements by syncing all devices twice each within a 1 hour period without making any manual changes between the syncs. (That's been discussed on the forums for two devices. I'm not sure if it's true for three devices.)
__________________
Cheers,

Curt
 
This has also been my experience with iPhone and MacBook .
Sync each twice within the same hour ..dropped from 143 zip files to 23 the next time I checked .
 
My understanding is that it is a bit more subtle than that. You need to have all the devices get in sync at t = 0, and then do that again at t >= 1 hour. After that, the transaction history over an hour old (which everyone agreed upon at t = 0) will be consolidated by the next device to do a sync. The 1 hour window is there to protect against a very slow sync that might be in progress. Syncing each twice within the same hour won't necessarily trim everything as is easily demonstrated. Anything less than an hour old will stay even if all the clients are up to date. Activity after t = 0 won't prevent the compaction, but the activity after t=0 won't be compacted until a subsequent compaction.

Basically, if all the devices are able to communicate for two successive hourly syncs, you'll only have zip files for any intervening transactions, plus one for the big collection of transactions that makes up the body of the database, plus any orphaned transactions which have somehow become unlinked. I find it works well at n = 4, so long as the 4th device (a second boot partition I use for testing) gets synced every day or two, otherwise the zip file count can grow pretty quickly.
 
I must just be hitting that range by accident then ?
Bottom line for me is , I've found both the iphone and mac client need synced pretty frequently to keep the files to a smaller amount .

I've made a practice of opening the iphone client and starting a sync everytime I leave my office .

yeah my method is definitely hit-n-miss , I see I'm at 138 zip files again . oh well .
 
whpalmer4's explanation fits what I've seen here.

I have two clients (iPhone and Mac) and sync them both multiple times everyday. Unless I make a whole bunch of changes at once, it seems my number of transaction files generally hovers around 20. And occasionally, I'll even spot it at only 1 file (the root file).

Months ago, I monitored this coalescence thing pretty closely, going so far as to write a script to log the number of transaction files and their timestamps throughout the day so I could analyze it later.

Eventually, however, it became obvious that OmniFocus was consistently doing the right thing and I got bored with checking. Now I just trust the system and try not to think about it too much. :-)

But I think the best advice is still to be sure to sync all your clients on a regular basis.

-Dennis
 
is it possible to sync too often ?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by ext555 View Post
is it possible to sync too often ?
No, I don't think so. At least not that I can tell. Only Omni would be able provide a definitive answer, of course.

It looks like each time you sync a client machine, a .client file is created on your sync server. These files then appear to be cleaned up when the database is later compacted.

So I supposed you might be able to sync so often that it'd create a whole bunch of these .client files on your sync server. But the files are so small that I can't imagine you could possibly create enough of them to cause any real problem. Plus, they're cleaned up along with the transaction files when things compact.

So maybe the worst thing that might happen is you'll wear out your mouse button by clicking too much. ;-)

-Dennis
 
 


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