Backup Eccentricity

[Tom Banks]

I wish the manual covered TF’s ideas on backup, because the process does not behave as I would expect from other apps.
1) I set the preference to backup on Quit. But I find it depends on how I quit. If I quit while the form is open, backup occurs. But if I close the form and quit the app, no backup. So to backup I have to quite the app with the form open, even if I want to work on some other forms next. Plus I have to discover this behavior the hard way, not in the manual, so far as I can find. What I was expecting was that backup-on-quit would back up any form that had changed.
2) I set the number of copies to keep of a given form in the backup file at five, but it just keeps adding more backups. I was quickly up to fifteen, even though the limit of 5 was plainly visible.
3) A big problem: As the accumulation of backups of that one form built, I discovered it was deleting the backups I had made of other forms. I made backups of forms A, B, C, and D (let us say), but A, B, and C were being deleted as more of D accumulated. I have had to make another folder in which to save backups of backups, or else risk TF deleting them.
4) In the bottom right corner of a form is an Edit button that turns into a Save/Cancel button when clicked. Is this for (per Manual) Photos only? In the Mac world I know, Save on a document means write it to disk.
5) Under the circumstances, I think having the Backup command button buried in Preferences => Sync makes unnecessary extra steps. Why not just put a button on the form window itself?
6) In short, it looks to me like the backup procedure of TF is not to be trusted.

[Brendan]

Hi Tom,

Yes, the Backup on Quit is just that, a backup upon quitting the app, not upon closing a document. So the document must be open at the time you quit.

I’ll look into the Number of Copies issue for the automatic backup issue. If you share the same Backup folder amongst different documents, then Tap Forms will remove backups from other documents. Because it counts the number of files within your Backup folder and deletes as necessary. If you share the same folder for backups for all the documents, then yes, you’ll see different documents backups being deleted. That is a per-document setting, so you can specify a different Backup folder for each document if you like.

The Backup command in the Preferences isn’t the only one. There’s also one in the File menu you can use to make ad-hoc backups whenever you like.

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