TOPIC: Dropbox sync problem - lost thoughts

All,

I had a fairly serious problem with the Dropbox sync this morning. I had entered two new items on my iphone, and did the normal dropbox sync. However, when I went to the "thoughts" screen in the desktop app, I didn't see the two new items, but instead saw double copies of the previous 7 items that were already in my thoughts screen (some of which had come from the desktop app, and some from the iphone). And, the 2 new items I'd added weren't among them, and weren't on my phone any more either.

It gets worse: I selected the 2nd copy of each of those 7 items, thinking they were just duplicates (which has happened before) and hit "delete" ... at which point, ALL of the items in the thoughts box disappeared, not just the 7 I'd selected ... with no way to undo or get them back! I managed to rectify the situation by going back to an earlier backup file from this morning (thank goodness for that) but that seems like a really serious bug. I also had to go into my dropbox history and restore an older version of syncup.txt to get back the 2 items I'd saved on my phone and tried to sync.

I guess this would be pretty hard to reproduce, but I wanted to put it out there in case you can think of any reason why this might happen. I like the dropbox sync in that it's a little more convenient, but my experience so far is that the wifi sync is much more reliable.

Ian

firstly, sorry to hear you've had problems.

It kinda sounds like the previous sync failed and didn't clean up the sync files, and the subsequent sync was broken as a result.

I'll see if I can think up a test case for this.

Thanks, Section8.

At this point, I've gone back from the Dropbox sync to the wifi sync. I've had a couple more issues:

1) Recently, I opened my iphone app after what I thought had been a successful sync, to discover that all of my tasks were gone--the iphone had absolutely nothing in it (not even topics, contexts, etc). A later successful sync brought it back, but there was no way for me to tell while it was happening that it had wiped everything, and it wasn't very convenient to discover this while out and about.

2) This morning, I tried several times to sync, and every time, it would get as far as uploading my thoughts from the phone to the desktop app, then hang; none of the rest of the sync process would complete. Did this a bunch of times, and restarted the app, to no avail.

If you get more bugs worked out of this, please do let me know, as I think it'd be useful. But at this point, it's not ready for the public, IMO.

ivarley wrote:

Clearly the apps are able to talk to each other but the sync is failing part of the way through. We have seen a problem like this once before. It turned out the user had something in their data file that the sync module was unable to parse.

Can you do another sync and email us the log file (View->IDE Log in the menus)? use the support email in the contact us section.