Odd Syncing Problem

[ArsAstronautica]

I have 4 Macs, an iPhone (6+), and an iPad (Air 2). All the Macs are currently running El Capitan. iDevices are all running 9.0.2. All 4 Macs and 2 iDevices are on iCloud and freely exchange iCloud data. TF is the latest on all devices.

Tap Forms on one Mac is misbehaving. If I add data to TF from any of the three other Macs or two iDevices, it will show up on the misbehaving Mac, as well as all the others. However, any data added to TF on the misbehaving Mac never shows up anywhere else.

One other piece of evidence is that the misbehaving Mac’s name does not appear in the Cloud Sync window.

Lastly, I don’t think this is an El Capitan issue. I noticed the name of the misbehaving Mac was missing in the list before I upgraded. It’s an old Mac and I use it as a sort of backup in case of failure, so pushing out data from it has never been much of a priority.

Thoughts?

[Brendan]

Hey Ars,

Try unchecking the Enable Sync button on the misbehaving Mac. Wait until it’s finished doing that. Then reboot it. Then go back in and re-enable sync. Hopefully it’ll show up on all the other devices after that.

Thanks,

Brendan

[ArsAstronautica]

Essentially I did close to that. After the post, I noticed that the DB was roughly twice what it was on the other devices. Cleaning the DB had no effect on size, which was strange.

So I disabled TF on the iCloud Drive (via sys prefs) and then disabled in in TF. I was then able to clean the DB, since TF transferred the DB to the local hard drive. I then re-enabled TF iCloud Drive (via sys prefs), and then re-enabled iCloud syncing, and then re-synced. All is working now.

I attribute it to spooks.

[Brendan]

Hi Ars,

Well actually by enabling or disabling sync has no bearing on where the database file resides. Tap Forms always stores its database file in the following location no matter whether sync is enabled or not:

~/Library/Containers/com.tapforms.mac/Data/Documents/TapForms_db.sqlite

What is stored in the cloud are the photos, file attachments, and sync files. A new sync file get generated every time you press the upload to cloud button.

Just thought I’d explain what’s going on.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Brendan]

Oh, but I’m very happy you got it working properly now.

[ArsAstronautica]

OK. The reason I disabled it was to help minimize any chance of corrupting any data. What was odd was that I could not vacuum the database until I had turned iCloud off.

But all that aside, two other issues:

1) I cannot seem to log into the forum without a password reset each time. Given my password is stored in my keychain and I reset it each time to the same one, there seems to be something wrong with the sign-in process on your side. Tried about half a dozen times this time and finally did a reset. Had to do a reset yesterday to. Any ideas?

2) But back to El Capitan and synching. I am experiencing a periodic crash of TF on the Mac. It **appears** to be synching related. I have sync at launch and at quit turned on. Not too infrequently TF crashes when I quit. There also seems to be random crashes when I manually sync. This is true of all the Macs I run TF on, including my wife’s. Hers is a different DB and iCloud account, etc.

Don’t know if it is related, but I also upgraded to the iCloud Drive on all my devices.

[Brendan]

Hi Ars,

1. I’m not aware of the forum login issue, although you can tell it to remember your password in a cookie on the login screen. That’s what I do. I did update the reCaptcha from Google just yesterday. It’s just a WordPress plug-in and periodically they send out updates.

2. I know there’s a race condition of sorts on Sync on launch, but that may have been with an older build. Try turning that one off and see if that helps. Although I’m pretty sure the result of that issue was that you may get a Sync Failed error popup shortly after launching sometimes. Which version of Tap Forms are you using? I’ve sent out a bunch of updates recently.

[ArsAstronautica]

OK, updates:

1) I seemed to have logged in just fine this time. I’m sure the reason it worked is because I complained. ;-)

2) I turned off the sync on launch and the sync before quit. This seems to have stopped the intermittent crashes. So for now, I will just manually sync.

And yes, I was getting the “Sync Failed error popup shortly after launching”, though “sometimes” seemed more like “more often than not”. BTW, that message would pop up was despite the fact it was actually successful in syncing. In nay case, I’ll leave both options off for now. In the past I always manually synced anyways.

Versions:
OSX 3.5.4 build 700
iOS 4.0.3

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