Speeding Up OmniFocus Sync

Some great tips by Sven Fechner on how you can speed OmniFocus sync. It involves archiving data on the Mac and resetting sync databases on your iOS devices:

The free OmniSync Server makes life a lot easier and keeps your OmniFocus world, well, in sync. If you use your own WebDAV server you have the same capabilities but without the awesome “Mail Drop” feature which allows you to email in your actions.

While the OmniSync Server is fairly reliable, it is not necessarily the fastest syncing solution on the planet. In particular when your database gets larger and more convoluted.

It’s the first time I’ve followed this procedure, and, indeed, my OmniFocus database has been slimmed down and it now takes 5-8 seconds less to sync on WiFi; the improvement is even more considerable on 3G.

I’ve used my own WebDAV server with OmniFocus for months, but the convenience (and simplicity) of the Mail Drop feature lured me back to Omni Sync Server. Mail Drop works amazingly well in conjunction with Drafts, allowing me to quickly send off a task to my OmniFocus inbox in the cloud. In moving to Omni Sync Server, I didn’t lose the ability to have the latest version of my OmniFocus database mirrored to a calendar: OmniFocus does, in fact, come with some great debug commands to change its default sync times.

As an aside, while looking forward to OmniFocus 2, The Omni Group has posted the first batch of videos from The Setup event in San Francisco a few weeks ago. You can watch them here.