[tomboy-list] "Server is locked" and Little sync disaster

[Sandy Armstrong]

On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Josep M <josepm.fontana at upf.edu> wrote:
> A while ago I sent a message asking about the possibility of using Dropbox
> to sync notes across different computers. I was warned of the dangers of
> doing it and now I'm suffering the consequences of not following that sound
> piece of advice.
>
> The thing is, I had two laptops connected to the net at the same time but I
> was not using Tomboy in both of them at the same time. All I did was to try
> to synchronize the contents of the Dropbox folder where I had saved a copy
> of the Tomboy notes (by synchronizing the notes with that folder in my main
> computer). I thought that as long as I didn't try to modify a note from the
> two different computers at the same time, I wouldn't have a problem. But the
> synchronization process went array and Tomboy hung in the middle of the
> synchronization without finishing. I was not aware of this, but Dropbox
> deleted the contents that had not been synchronized from the Dropbox
> subfolder where I kept my Tomboy notes in the second computer. What I think
> happened is the following: I restarted Tomboy and tried to sync again;
> Tomboy had imported some of the files in the synchronization attempt but not
> all of them; the synchronization copied the files it considered more recent
> to the sync folder and deleted the ones that had not been imported in the
> first synchronization attempt?
>
> Anyway, I will probably never know what really happened, but to make the
> story short  I went back to my first computer and continued to work with
> Tomboy, then when I clicked on synchronization I realized there were a bunch
> of notes (and a lot of hours of work) that had disappeared.

What version of Tomboy are you using?  0.12.0 and 0.12.1 had a known
sync bug that could cause notes to be deleted (they are always deleted
to ~/.tomboy/Backup, btw, so you can recover them).  I recommend you
use Tomboy 0.12.2 or 0.14.1.

> I was now trying to recover the notes by attempting to restore deleted
> contents in Dropbox via the web interface but when I try to sync with the
> Dropbox folder I continuously get a message that says "Server is locked. One
> of your other computers is currently synchronizing. Please wait 2 minutes
> and try again". But I have only one computer on. I have even disabled
> Dropbox. So, I don't know what the problem is.

If you are manually messing with the files in your "sync server"
folder, I think it would be easy to completely confuse sync.  Your
best bet right now is probably to get all the right notes on *one*
computer, clear your "sync server" folder, delete your ~/.tomboy on
your other computers, and start over.

> Besides helping me solve this problem, if there is anybody that has found a
> good system to synchronize notes between different computers, I would
> appreciate hearing from him/her. I work with three different computers and
> finding a good synchronization system is essential for me.

The inherent fragility of this sort of sync is the reason why I want
to focus a lot of effort on offering free online sync to our users.
Expect news about this in the coming weeks.

Until then, Mike Fletcher has written a NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in
that notices title and content (but not tag or other metadata) changes
in ~/.tomboy, and updates your notes automatically.  It might be
something that would work better in your situation.  On Monday I will
be releasing it as part of Tomboy 0.15.0, and also as a separate
download for Tomboy 0.14.x users.  Hopefully I'll have the metadata
stuff fixed so that it works well for all data changes.  I'm not sure
if you can tell Dropbox to sync your ~/.tomboy, or use symlinks or
something, but another upcoming changes will be the ability to use XDG
standards for storing note data, so it will be easier to keep your
notes in non-standard directories.

Using Dropbox with the existing file system sync backend *should*
normally work, as long as you wait a bit before syncing each computer,
so I'm not sure what initially caused your problems.  If it happens
again, please file a bug.

Hope this helps,
Sandy