[sgiovannini]

This is an old thread, but I'm having this exact issue. I just upgraded to 1.8.2 on the iPhone and the Mac.

Suggestions?

[Ken Case]

This message indicates an inconsistent set of entries in your OmniFocus database. Please contact our tech support ninjas by email at omnifocus@omnigroup.com (or escalate to urgent@omnigroup.com) or by telephone at 800-315-6664 and we'll diagnose and repair your database or help you repair it yourself if you prefer.

A little more background, if you're curious:

An OmniFocus database is arranged as a tree of transactions, starting with a "root" transaction (forming the base of the tree) and spreading out towards the—well, to continue the metaphor, I guess we should have called them "leaves", but as it happens actually call them "tails". Anyway, whenever you make a change, OmniFocus writes a new transaction at the "tail" end of the tree, forming a new tail which is connected to the existing transactions and ultimately leading back to the graph's root. This error message indicates that you somehow have more than one root transaction, and that none of them can reach all of the tail transactions. (It's actually OK to have more than one root transaction temporarily—we create a new root to coalesce all the older transactions into a smaller tree—but any new root should always be able to reach all of the tree.)

The only explanation I can think of is that something might have restored or merged an old copy of the database with the latest copy, so the old tree and new tree are both sitting in the same directory and neither one can reach all the tails. (I've seen this happen when restoring an OmniFocus database using backup software which tracks file additions and updates but not deletions.)

Again, at this point I recommend that you talk with our support ninjas to repair your database. But if you really want to take a stab at fixing this yourself…

1. Make a backup of your OmniFocus.ofocus database (so you can get back to where you started if you make a mistake).
   
2. Look for the root transactions in the database—their filenames all start with "00000". Pick the root you want to keep, and delete any other roots.
   
3. Load your database, and make sure everything looks right.
   
4. If it looks like you picked the wrong root, restore the backup copy you just made in step one and go back to step 2 to try deleting one of the other roots instead.

Hope this helps!

[sgiovannini]

Well, it took me a pretty long time to get around to fixing this. I did fix it, but not as you suggested.

I couldn't find files starting with 00000. I suppose I'd have to open the database to find them, but I don't know how to do that.

I used File/Replace Server Database from my Mac. I suppose I might have lost iPhone-entered data, but I'd been using only the Mac version since sync wasn't working, and there was nothing to lose.

I should add that I might not have made my issue clear. The original thread I posted to is gone (separated?), but I only said I had the same issue. I did have the "root/tail" issue, but the error messages indicated the problem was on the iDisk copy of the database. I should have repeated the entire error message in my original post.

It's working now.