I’m delighted that it looks as if my two Macs have managed to sync the 3500+ listings I am currently running. It took a full 24 hours to get the first one to upload, and another 24 or so to get the second one to download again, but earlier today I did make sure that both had all the same folders, numbers of listings, and as far as I could tell the same tag states and User Property info.
That said, I do wish there was more feedback on progress and state. During the initial setup I had the long slow progress bars, but now when I manually sync I get a brief dialog box that flashes up and mentions something about Uploads and Downloads (not using the Activity window?). And when it happens automatically in the background I can’t really tell it’s there, except that the app refuses to quit and the File > Synching submenu shows the status. Is there something else going on I should be watching for?
I ask because it looks like there are a few dozen listings now out of sync on the two machines. The laptop I’ve been working on all day has been connected, and I assume it’s been sending updates/diffs to the servers, but how do I know when the other one is supposed to be “done”? Because at the moment it does not say it’s synching, and it’s not right.
Ah, now I realize that I am very occasionally (as in once a day?) getting a dialog box on the out-of-sync machine telling me that “Synchronization Failed”.
Is this something I can address myself, or do I need an intervention?
Luckily I was a little slow trying to re-synch my entire database up to GS and back down again to the other Mac, because it gave me time to see the warning from my broadband provider that I was already close to over-using the allowed bandwidth for the entire month (which is just 1 Tb/month).
Maybe as a feature request or design suggestion, could you consider a way to reduce the bandwidth substantially for initial syncs? Maybe as a test batch, or a throttle of some sort? If I exceed my bandwidth again, they have threatened to increase my billing permanently in the future…
Is there a way for you to check how many bandwidth/month left?
If so, you then could assess whether the remaining bandwidth is sufficient for the initial upload of your GarageSale database. (after checking the size of your database, of course)
…however, you probably don’t do “initial uploads” that often.
Yes, just this month when I have been debugging “synchronization failed” errors, using 2x machines.
No, I know, but it also seems as if maybe the business logic here is flawed:
upload entire canon database to GS cloud
delete local database on receiving machine
download entire canon database from GS cloud
(2) in particular seems like it could be done faster and more carefully using a more thoughtful merge on a lower level, instead of a full table dump. Especially since the source machine may change the GS version while a long download is happening.
Given that I have many of the same listings already (after a failed synch) on both machines, the purge and replace approach seems like overkill.
I guess what I am suggesting is something more like “well synch failed but here are the ones that are the same”. I’ve never once seen a “conflict” show up, despite several failures.
I understand that synching is very complicated. But the brute force approach (which I have tried at least twice now) just means you are left doing support on edge cases created by large-db users like me all the time.