[HappyDude]

I spent some time reading up on how without archiving frequently on the Mac app all the files when syncing to the iPhone app are transferred over..

So I went ahead and did that, but truthfully i'm completely befuddled as to how I went from 12 Zip Files to 532?

I just got the app over a week ago and clicking on the icon on the iPod Touch got OF to open up extremely quickly. 12 zip files, some 30+ projects and 200+ actions. (Personally I feel these #'s are low; but only cause I admittedly fell of the GTD wagon for a bit. :D)

Well, upon syncing I then noticed startup on the OF iPod Touch app was slow. I'd say a good 10-15 seconds as opposed to what I normally got used to, less than 2 seconds.

Yesterday under info on the Touch it says, 43 projects, 290 actions and 532 zip files.

[This was mid "weekly review"]

Then today I decided to do the "Move old data to archive" and set the date to 9/5/09 and fortunately this took me down to 93 zip files on the iPod Touch...

So in a sense the problem was somewhat solved, though startup on the Touch is not as fast as it once originally was...

..But my main concern here is attempting to understand what was going on. I'm sure to some degree you like to feel in control, or at least in the know, of what the heck just happened. Perhaps understanding the situation a bit more as to why I got so many zip files all of a sudden and what that does to OF starting up more slowly on the iPod Touch will help me better mold my OF backing up habits, or....w/e.

:D

?

[Ken Case]

Each zip file records a change you've made to your database. OmniFocus has to keep a history of the changes you've made until you synchronize all the changes to all your devices and start a new set of changes based on a common synchronized understanding of what's in the database.

Moving old data to the archive actually adds another zip file, because that's another change. It doesn't reduce file sizes until you've synchronized that change to all your devices, at which point they can coalesce all the old change history and rewrite those in a new starting zip file (which will be smaller because it no longer includes those archived entries).

The way to keep your zip counts low is to synchronize your devices before starting new edits, so that each copy of OmniFocus is creating changes based on the synchronized database (rather than making changes to an out-of-date copy of the database, which means those edits can't be coalesced into the common timeline). You don't have to do that every time you open OmniFocus (it isn't always practical to wait for syncing), but if you do this every few days you'll see your zip file counts go down.

(OmniFocus 1.5.3 for iPhone will also help, by bringing to the iPhone some of the sync coalescing improvements we made in OmniFocus 1.7 for Mac. Those changes help every device get back to the common timeline with every sync.)