Syncing locked documents (DBS)

[Karl Reed]

Well, I moved the contents of my password manager which is on my iphone, (Lockit, the company that wrote it has disappeared, and, Lockit doesn’t run properly under OS 10 and, won’t survive the upgrade to IOS 11) by exporting the contents and then splitting the XL up for each category in the Locket set. These loaded into a new TapForms document and generated new forms as appropriate, quite easy.
And, I moved the new document to the iphone easily.
HOWEVER.. I am syncing over iCloud, and, the changes made on on platform appear at random tie intervals, sometime hours apart.
This is rather inconvenient, since, I need both platforms to be update (alomost) simulatenously.
I DON”T have this problem with unlocked documents..
(They ARE the same document, BTW, and, there is only one copy on each platform)

[Brendan]

Hi Karl,

I don’t actually have control over how long it takes the data to get from one device to another. As long as you see the Sync Sending message appear, you know Tap Forms is uploading the data to iCloud. Then it’s up to Apple to send notifications to the other devices.

I’m not sure why it’s taking so long. I don’t know why it would matter if the document was encrypted or not. The data synced to iCloud is not encrypted by Tap Forms. It’s encrypted by Apple But that’s the same way for encrypted or non-encrypted documents in Tap Forms. The data stored locally is encrypted of course, but then Tap Forms reads the data from the encrypted database and is then in memory unencrypted. Then the data is transmitted to Apple over a separately encrypted channel using SSL connections. But what Apple does with it is no difference between whether it’s an encrypted document or not.

So I’m not sure why there’s a delay when syncing encrypted documents. I’ll have to give it another try.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Karl Reed]

Thanks Brendan, I made a brand new doc on the mac, encrypted it and moved it to the phone, and, the updates were almost instantaneous. The document in question has been copied a couple of time, and, I have made sure that there is only one doc on each device with that ID.The DOC is not small, it has 35 forms and 135 records.. (well, thst’s not really big..).
BTW, I am recommending Tap Forms to friends and people I meet.The sync capability is pretty good now, and, the encryption seems to be pretty solid now..
Regards and great to talk to you..
Karl

[Brendan]

Hi Karl,

Thanks for recommending Tap Forms!

One thing you could try with your document that’s not syncing very quickly is you could use the Duplicate Document function. That will create a new copy of the document, but give it a new Document ID. You could try syncing that as a brand new document to your other devices and see if that works any better.

Thanks!

Brendan

[ArsAstronautica]

iCloud syncing has for the most part worked well for me. Uploading (or downloading) a new and large DB via iCloud can the some time. Apple throttles iCloud transfers too avoid bandwidth saturation on their end, which makes sense, even it is a nuisance for us.

However, once I have the basic DB synched, updates are pretty quick across my devices. Now I have seen old DBs that have grown up through lots of major TF updates and switching syncing methods, etc, etc, so who knows what happened, have this issue with slowness. What I have done in the past was to export the data, delete the old, and then re-import the data creating a new one with a different name to avoid confusion. This usually cleared up the issue.

Also, you can always manually force a resync if need be.

[Karl Reed]

Hi Brendan and Arstinautica, I have tried copying and moving the DB from mac to phone, and, exporting and creating annew DB and imorting (on the mac) and sending that to the phone. I have setb up a small DB for testing locks, and, the syncing is very fast as we speak, early on Sat morning my time, so, the iCloud throttleing issue may be the reason. I don’t want to move to IOS 11 until I have this sorted, although I now have a replacement for Lockit running on the phone, a locked Tap forms DB which works nicely, so (and I am contradicting myself), I can survive without that syncing properly.
BTW, can one export a whole DB in one hit? My Db’s hav 10’s of forms, and, moving one form at a time is a bit slow.

[Brendan]

Hi Karl,

You can use the Backup function to generate a zip file backup of your entire database. Go to the Tools screen, then the Backup & Restore screen, then tap the + button to add a new backup file.

Then tap on that backup file and then tap on the Upload button. You can upload your backup to a provided cloud service, such as Dropbox or iCloud Drive.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Karl Reed]

I think the answer is that speed loss in syncing is due to Apple throttling iCloud. As someone else said, that’s ok for a free service.
I wonder if it would be hard to dynamically switch from Cloud to Nearby?
I am trying to think about a handover protocol. Perhaps a default syncing method with the desk machine taking priority?

[Brendan]

Yes, Apple does throttle iCloud. When iCloud responds and says “wait a bit”, Tap Forms has to set a timer and try again a bit later to continue syncing. Apple tells Tap Forms how long to wait before retrying. If it doesn’t tell it, it waits 30 seconds. But when you’re syncing thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of objects, that can have a real impact on sync performance.

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