Re: [Bibdesk-users] Optimizing files for quicker response

[Simon S. <si...@si...>]

On 30.01.2009, at 15:27, Michael McCracken wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Jonas Zimmermann
> <li...@jo...> wrote:
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>> On 29.01.2009, at 15:38, Cloy Tobola wrote:
>>
>>> I have a Bibdesk bibliography file that's getting large - 1.1mb with
>>> 315 sources. (Breaking it into smaller files isn't a good option  
>>> right
>>> now.)
>>>
>>> Since I use the file (and attached PDFs) from several locations, I
>>> keep the file (and the auto-filed PDFs) on a WebDAV drive.
>>>
>>> That works okay, but it's getting slow. It often takes 2 or 3  
>>> minutes
>>> to open the file, and about 90 seconds to save it.
>>>
>>> Is there a way to optimize the file so it opens/saves more quickly?
>>
>>
>> The only thing that comes to my mind is using a version control  
>> system
>> such as SVN with this setup. So you can work locally on your files  
>> and
>> only synchronise when needed. But of course, this opens another huge
>> bag of problems...
>
> If you're used to version control, SVN might make sense. But it's a
> little overkill - you don't really need history and branching for this
> stuff, you just need backup and syncing.
>
> I haven't tried it, but it occurs to me that using dropbox might be
> the best way to solve Cloy's problem: https://www.getdropbox.com/
>
> It syncs files between computers but should be much faster than webDAV
> since it keeps local copies of the files and synchronizes
> asynchronously. It also sends minimal diffs - I believe webDAV sends
> entire file contents for every update.
>
> The free account lets you store up to 2GB. If anyone tries this out,
> please let us know how it works for you.

I use Dropbox quite extensively and I'm very fond of it. Among other  
things I have my .bib file with >3500 entries and about 300MB of PDFs  
which are managed by BibDesk on it. This works really nice and is for  
me so far the best solution to have my different machines in sync. I  
used unison before but here to disadvantage is that you always have to  
do the syncing by hand.

There's only one problem, although I'm not sure about it. I think that  
in some circumstances, PDFs on Dropbox can lose their Skim  
annotations. As I said, I'm not really sure that this is actually  
true, since I couldn't reproduce it, but I once lost my annotations  
(maybe this happened before when I synched with unison). Maybe on of  
the developers can shed light on this: Could this be problem of Dropbox?

On a related note: I'm not sure whether I got something wrong, but is  
it correct that BibDesk will only read Skim annotations in the PDF but  
not when they are in a seperate .skim file?

simon
--
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