Bruji

Hi Conor,

a few months are gone and I need your helping hand again.
You explained me last summer how to sync my CDpedia datas from my iMac to my MacBook pro.
It worked well but there was one point I never understood. WHEN does the syncing takes place?

My new problem is the following:
I did the data maintenance on my master iMac. After a while the new datas where available on my
MacBook too. But I don't know for what reason. Sometimes it tooks a few hours, sometimes days or maybe weeks.
It was okay as long I did the maintenance on my Master iMac.

Now I bought a second iMac and I' am using it in another country.
I can't do the maintenance on the Master-iMac anymore (for a few month).

The problem is the following:
Most of the datas are available on the iMac2, but not the datas from the last 3 or 4 weeks.

What could be the reason for that?
The datas are not available on the MacBook too.
I'm not able to do anything with my iMac1 because I turned it off.

So here are the questions:
Is there anything I can do too check if the datas are still on the "way"?
What is the master and what is the slave system?
When I put some new datas on my iMac2 - will they be overwritten from the
datas from the iMac1? Or will they be available next together?

I hope you understand what I'm trying to explain
and I like to thank you very much for your help.

P.S. Are you still working on a real iCloud version? I'll be your first customer!!

Best regards
Highway

The sync should normally be almost immediate. But this depends very much on your internet connection. From your description it sounds like the upload speed of the master is not that great and hence it takes a few days for data to make it to the server. The computer also has to be on for it to be able to be sending this data.

Dropbox actually puts an icon on your menu bar that you can click to find out how the sync is going and how much longer is needed. It looks like a box being opened with the four flaps to the sides. The bottom of the pop up that comes up should say "Up to date" when the data has been sent.

The best solution would be if you could have someone back home turn on the original iMac so that it can finish sending the data. Otherwise the data will overwrite what is on the Mac when yo uno get back.

What happens is a conflict is detected and the file with the most recent changes is used. It sometimes does merge the information if it can figure out how to do that, but I would never rely on this, as it's way to complex for the computer to handle and most of the time it does the correct thing and figure out the conflict by using the newest file. But does mean you lose the data you are not seeing right now.

If you are unsure of the upload capabilities for the sync to take place you can also have someone send you the data file from the original iMac. Located in in the synced folder, be it iCloud Drive or Dropbox. You could then install this in the same place on the new iMac. It will be missing some images, but you can always download those again.

It's the nature of the Cloud data, you need to have a decent connection for it to work seamlessly as it needs to be constantly updating the information online.

Actually rereading your old post you might actually be using iCloud Drive. Which is much more mysterious than Dropbox and does whatever it wants on a strange schedule. Debugging there is harder, but it's the same principal of making sure that the original computer has enough time to upload the changes. Maybe someone knows more about iCloud Drive and how to tell if a file has already been updated.

Hope the info helps to work it out.

Regards,
Conor

Hi Conor,

thank you very much for your quick answer.
Unfortunately there is nobody at my old home for the next few month.... Damn!

However!
What's going on with a brand new pedia cloud version?

CUsoon Highway

No clear answer yet for that one. It's looking much better on Sierra. But have only played around with it superficially, which would not reveal bugs. Still working on updating a number of underlying code for 10.11+ for the next big version. Once I have a new stable version, I would tackle the iCloud in ernest.

These are two possible trick solutions, not recommended as I have never done either. But could get you results since yo are likely to go on.

You could in essence mark the date of the last entry and catalog away on the new computer. Then when you do get home, cut the internet connection on the iMac, launch DVDpedia and export all entries since the noted last entry date into a .dvdpedia file. Then connect the internet let the application sync to the latest version and import the movies that you exported to the .dvdpedia file, by importing that file. These would have been the overwritten movies as they were not on your iMac2.

Or you could start a whole new data folder on iMac2 that will not overwrite the iMac1. Then export new movies as .dvdpedia and take it back to your master computer for import. (To start a new folder make a copy of the data folder and then double click that "Database.dvdpd" file to tell DVDpedia to load the new copy instead.)

That could be a good solution for that moment.
Once again. Thank you very much for your help.