DEVONthink To Go Gets Push Syncing

DEVONthink sync continues to improve, with last week’s update rolling out push-sync between devices. In my experimentation this is a very nice improvement for anyone running DEVONthink across iOS and macOS devices. This is how it works for me.

After a new DEVONthink sync is triggered on one device, a push message is sent to all other devices within a few seconds, initiating other synchronizations even if the app is not active.1 When I create a new document in DEVONthink To Go and immediately close the app, nothing really happens. It’s critical to remember to start a sync before closing the app.

While this update doesn’t completely solve the problem of out of date files across my devices, it does make it much better. As long as I remember to hit the cloud icon in the bottom status bar to start a sync on my iPhone, when I open my iPad the changes are already available. The same goes for my Mac.

Sync Trigger

I’ve really settled into DEVONthink as my long term external memory. I still don’t think it’s great as a transactional system but it really excels at capturing information, organizing it, and surfacing it when I want it. I continue to make improvements to my system with apps like Apple’s Shortcuts and this helps with some of the rough edges in DEVONthink. But, no external app could improve sync so I’m glad this is still an area of focus for DEVONtechnologies.

  1. I’m using iCloud for syncing and it’s fast. I have somewhere around 10GB of files syncing across 9 databases, all through iCloud. ↩︎