Database maintenance

[Alan Wong]

Dear Brendan,

I run Tap Forms on 4 devices (iPhone, iPad, 2 Macs). My database is small, only about ~50MB. What is the best database maintenance strategy would you recommend? Shall I only do it after the database reaches a certain size? Or should I do it weekly, monthly or quarterly? Am I right that I need to run the database maintenance tools on each device? I don’t expect this to happen via the cloud. :)

I recently had a small problem in iCloud syncing. A new record in a super small form didn’t sync. The form is so small I could actually delete and rebuild it with no time. But I’m thinking if “Reset iCloud Sync” may help. What exactly does “Reset iCloud Sync” do?

My last question is about Backup & Restore. Is it good enough just to keep backups on my Mac? It may be a stupid question to ask: I already run Time Machine to constantly backup everything, do I still need to run Tap Forms’ Backup?

Thank you very much!

Alan

[Brendan]

Hello Alan,

Database Maintenance is useful when you do a lot of work on your database by adding records, deleting records, etc. Also, sometimes things go wrong and running the analyze and rebuild indexes commands can help with that. Recently there was a performance problem with version 3.8.2 for iOS. Running the database maintenance tasks made it work faster. So if you add a lot of records and delete a lot of records, it can help speed things up.

Reset iCloud Sync will delete the sync and registered device files that Tap Forms writes to iCloud whenever you enable iCloud sync and upload your data to iCloud. You upload your data to iCloud whenever you tap or click on the upload to iCloud button.

It’s a good idea to run the Backup command every once in a while. That will gather all the data you have in your database including file attachments, photos, etc. and store them into a Zip file. If you ever need to restore to a certain point in time, you can do that easily with the backup file.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Alan Wong]

Thanks, Brendan. Shall I run database maintenance on all 4 devices or is it good enough to do it on one device? Likewise, do I need to backup on all 4 devices or is it OK to just backup on one Mac?

Thanks!

Alan

[Brendan]

Hi Alan,

You would need to run it on all 4 devices. Tap Forms maintains a separate copy of your database on each device. That separate copy is not synced to iCloud. Only the changes made to the database file are synced to iCloud.

As long as your Mac has all your data, it’s fine to backup just on the Mac.

Thanks!

Brendan

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