Driving Me Nuts

[Stephen Dickson]

Hi there,

I use Tap Forms on iMac, iPhone and iPad. I have several forms.

I have it using iCloud sync.

One of the forms is different on all three devices, with stuff missing on one or other and one is corrupted all together.

It’s totally driving me nuts and I’m about to actually bin Tap Forms. If I lose some of the information that one is not showing it’s months of work probably not recoverable.

When I update on the main one on the imac it only partially updates on the other one (that’s working).

I cannot now rely at all on Tap Forms as I can’t guarantee that any of them are accurate.

[Stephen Dickson]

Stuff now appearimg and disappearing on different devices seemingly randomly. Total mess.

[Stephen Dickson]

I restored from a back up of a few days ago on my iPad (totally corrupted one) and it looked fine again. Then it synced automatically and it’s all crap again.

[Sam Moffatt]

If your iCloud sync is corrupt, you can use the app to delete the data from iCloud in the sync area, restore from a backup and then resync the data back to iCloud. You’ll need to disable iCloud sync on the other devices and I would probably restore them from the same backup to ensure everything is consistent.

[Sam Moffatt]

As an aside if you’re running on your local network, you can use the nearby sync and leave Tap Forms open on your iMac to sync against. I suggest configure it so that your iMac has all of the other devices added to it so that it’ll pull changes from them. Then each other device adds the iMac so it can sync changes back from it.

If you’re up for something a little more complicated, setting up CouchDB on the iMac works as well. There is some documentation in the online manual in the Apache CouchDB section.

[Stephen Dickson]

Thanks Sam. You saved my sanity. I had a back up from about a week ago which i can recover from.

I managed to get it back to all of them seeing the same thing by turning off all iCloud syncs and uploading the same backup to them all seperately.

I must be doing something wrong though. If I put a new entry on the main one (iMac) it doesnt seem to want to go through to the other two when the sync is switched on. Even if i refresh the sync the information doesnt seem to want to transfer to the other two devices.

I am up for complicated and will try your suggestions later but it would be good to understand why they are not syncing.

[David Oxtoby]

Sadly, this is becoming a deal breaker, as i have tried to sync via iCloud, and then via CloudDB (hosted on IBM Cloud), and i still get random fields appearing/disappearing on the forms. I sync between two Macs and one iOS device. Today i came into find my primary field on one form had just randomly deleted itself and all it’s data, before now i’ve had fields also just rename themselves to New Field. Is there a likely fix anytime soon?

[Stephen Dickson]

Hi David,

I definitely feel your pain. Don’t know if you saw my other thread from the other day I have random missing fields on different devices even missing when I do a restore from a good database. It’s totally confusing.

Problem is that I’m definitely getting to the stage I can’t trust the data. What is right and what is wrong. It’s obviously something going on if more than one person is coming across it.

Problem is I quite liked Tap Forms and have been with them since Bento disappeared. Having paid for it I’m loathed to pay for another. Are there any suggestions on what other one to use? I like the simplicity and versatility of Tap Forms but if reliability is a problem I might be forced to leave too.

My other thread at:

Form That Has Dropped Fields

[David Oxtoby]

Hi Stephen, it’s an issue I’ve tried to put up with this I started using TapForms because it’s such a great flexible database system much like Bento was, but as I’ve developed office systems and noticed dropped fields/data it can’t be trusted, unless I probably turn off sync altogether, but defeats the point of it, as it’s great having my data available across my devices.

Not sure what other flexible alternatives there are, Nino looks interesting, as does AirTables, but non offer the power as TapForms. Hoping a fix comes soon.

[Stephen Dickson]

Yeah had looked at those two as well but as you say Tap Forms is just so usable in comparison. I only using it as a home database for certain things like my whisky collection but that has nearly 200 entries. It matters if stuff disappears.

Hopefully we get an answer at one point but no one from the company seems to be about so we may well not.

It’ll be annoying to move but if I have to I will.

[Daniel Leu]

I’m using Tap Forms for work with several thousand records in our CRM. We use a central CouchDB server for synchronization. I never noticed dropped fields or lost data.

[Stephen Dickson]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your input. I’m just a standard home user and after reading that it seems very complicated. I might give it a go though. During this lockdown I’m not doing much else. ?

[Sam Moffatt]

I certainly saw a bunch of weird issues with TF5 and Nearby sync but the performance was much better than iCloud and I didn’t want to pay IBM. Most of them went away when I did a star topology with my iMac but every so often I made a triangle which fixed some sync issues. I shifted to CouchDB support when it was added and since then I haven’t run into many more weird issues. I have had one instance where bringing an old device online caused a script field to be overwritten (I think Brendan improved the sync code to fix this at some point too) but that’s the only issue I’ve noticed. In at least the last year that I can recall I haven’t had an issue.

I certainly recommend getting CouchDB setup, I ran mine on an old iMac 2011 for the longest time before finally moving it to a dedicated Linux box I bought a couple of years back.

However because there can be issues, this is also why I have multiple backup solutions for Tap Forms on my GitHub. I do this on top of routine backups of the Tap Forms document on my Mac as well. It doesn’t matter what scale you’re at, having backups should be a part of your technology solution. Sync is not a backup solution and I’m yet to meet a perfect solution when you have a split brain. Tap Forms does a reasonable job in my opinion and I’ve not had too many issues.

The central CouchDB server (or Cloudant if you wanted) provides a bidirectional sync from a central spoke. This means your device proactively reaches out to to the server to push changes that are made locally and when the server receives updates it proactively pushes the change to your device (if Tap Forms is open) otherwise you pull them down next time you connect to the server. The Nearby sync is only ever on a pull model which can make it hard to force consistent state across all devices as replication state is at the document level. Because it’s a pull model as well also means that there isn’t anything that proactively gets the changes off your device, it’s up to the puller to pull down the changes.

tl;dr dedicated CouchDB is great for reliability, you can install it on your Mac and get it working on your home network

[Brendan]

CouchDB definitely is my preferred sync solution.It’s free and works very well. It can run on the same Mac that you run Tap Forms on and all your other devices can sync to it. It’s literally a double-clickable application just like any other Mac app.

I agree with Sam that backups are an integral requirement for any kind of data. I backup my Mac to an external SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner, to Time Machine, and my source code for Tap Forms to GitHub. You can never be too safe. So that way if anything goes wrong with your computer, you’ve always got some way of getting the data back.

But if something goes wrong with the sync within Tap Forms or something gets deleted and that gets synced, restoring from a backup and then syncing will just cause that thing to get deleted again because the deletion was synced too. That’s why you have to disable sync, delete the document from the server (e.g. the Delete from iCloud button, or deleting the database from CouchDB), then restore your document.

Another technique might be to archive a form using the Export Tap Forms Archive function. Then if something goes wrong, import that archive and everything in that form will be restored. It will also retain anything new that you had added since you made the archive.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brendan]

Oh, and my apologies for not responding to this thread sooner. I wasn’t ignoring it. I just didn’t see it for some reason until today.

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