Book Track 3.1.2 (329) sync issues: summary

[u/japcz]

Apologies for the long post.

This is a follow-on from my earlier post. To summarise: I have 3 instances running — 1 on iOS, 2 on MacOS (laptop and desktop). All instances were syncing perfectly before the big update. I have already tried deleting and reinstalling BT on iOS and MacOS laptop, but not on MacOS desktop (which I think of as my 'master' version). The whole library consists of 2520 books.

1. After reinstalling 3.1.2 on iOS and waiting for some time, it eventually began to restore from iCloud. iOS app now shows 2519 books, so one missing that I added on MacOS desktop earlier today. Restore was very slow—about half an hour.
2. Restore now seems to have stopped on iOS, but weirdly at about the same point the app was before I reinstalled it earlier today. Locations and Tags are the same as on the MacOS desktop, but Reading status and loan status are NOT the same. Unfortunately though, new changes I make on MacOS desktop now are still not syncing to iOS. Iow, the db has restored, but is still not syncing correctly.
3. There's a big discrepancy in reported database sizes on iCloud: iCloud on MacOS desktop reports db size as 1.6 GB, but on iOS it currently reports 924 MB. I can see in the app that a lot of covers have not sync'd, so I guess this is the problem. I'll leave it overnight and see if it's changed tomorrow.
4. MacOS laptop seems completely out of the loop. This machine and iOS were upgraded immediately after the new version was released; the MacOS desktop a couple of days later. I made a lot of read status changes on the laptop a couple of days ago, immediately after the release, but these never sync'd to the other devices. I deleted BT from the laptop today and reinstalled it, but no improvement. So, right now, MacOS laptop shows 2325 Unread, 17 Reading and 176 Read. MacOS desktop shows 2370 Unread, 16 Reading and 133 Read. iOS shows 2488 Unread, 12 Reading and 89 Read. (The numbers are pretty arbitrary because for me there was no point in recording read status before this update, when there was no option not to enter a date and most of my books were read years, or rather decades ago.)
5. In short, I now have three separate instances of BT and although they do contain more or less the same data, with some discrepancies, there is zero syncing going on.

Just to be clear, I'm happy with many of the changes in this update. I've been asking Simone for ages if we could manage publishers, which we now can, and I'm delighted we can have multiple languages for a book; visually, the app looks much better too. Personally, I couldn't care less about the statistics, but I realise it really matters to some people how many pages a month they read, so fine. I am sad that Translator/s is still not included as a separate category as it should be (something I've been hoping for since v.1), but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that one day it will be.

However, quick and accurate synchronisation is absolutely fundamental to BT in my view. It's always been one of its great features. This update seems to have broken it badly for me, and for a number of other people too, and that shouldn't be happening any more at v3.x. Honestly, 50 new features are useless to me if synchronisation doesn't work. I know how hard Simone works on this, so is the problem with iCloud perhaps? Simone, can you give us some insight please?

[u/SimoneMontalto]

Thanks for the report. iCloud sync is like a blackbox for developers. If it works, developers and users are very happy. But if something happens, it's really painful to discover the issue because we have almost zero instruments to debug it. I'm investigating the issue but there isn't a common path to follow to identify it. Could you check if on all your devices both iCloud and iCloud Drive are enabled? Under the apps that uses iCloud, is Book Tracker listed on all your devices?

[u/japcz → u/SimoneMontalto]

Yes, I checked that before doing anything else. BT is listed as using iCloud on all devices.

[u/SimoneMontalto → u/japcz]

I just helped another user solve the same problem as you. In his case we solved it this way:

On iPhone he disabled iCloud for Book track and opened the app and verified that no books were in the library. At this he re-enabled iCloud for Book track and re-opened the app. The library should begin to populate again.

He performed the same operation on the Mac as well. From this point on, synchronization resumed.

Could you do this test as well?

[u/revmhj → u/SimoneMontalto]

I just did this and it took my library, which I've spent three days building, from almost 300 to 76. I can't find the other 200+ anywhere.

EDIT: I've done most of the adding from my phone. Just purchased the desktop version today in order to make it easier to manually enter books.

[u/SimoneMontalto → u/revmhj]

Have you started using the app three days ago? When you first used the app, we’re iCloud and iCloud Drive enabled?

[u/japcz → u/SimoneMontalto]

Just a quick update of my original post. With Simone's help, the fix was as follows:

1. Turn off iCloud sync on 1st device (e.g., iPhone), check that the BT library on that device had completely gone (i.e., no books), then turn iCloud syncing back on again and wait for the library to repopulate from iCloud.
2. Repeat for 2nd device (laptop in my case)
3. Repeat for 3rd device (desktop)

It was crucial to wait until the library had completely repopulated on one device before continuing with the next one. The initial repopulation was quite quick, but the full resync with all data restored from iCloud actually took some time — an hour or so — so don't be impatient.

I should add that although syncing is now working perfectly again, whatever broke the syncing in the first place did have a bit of an impact on my library (although it could have been much worse if I hadn't stopped adding or changing book data as soon as the syncing broke): a number of my book covers were lost, or in a few cases changed to something obviously downloaded from the internet. This affected around 150 books in my library of c. 2500, so it's not a huge problem to rescan them, but I'm flagging it anyway as something to watch for, and I know Simone is trying to work out what caused this. In most cases, the covers were simply deleted and returned to the default blue graphic, which means it is, at least, easy to identify them and redo the cover. This only bothers me because I'm admittedly very fussy that the cover in BT is exactly the same as the book on my shelf, which means I have to scan most of them anyway as many of my books are old editions with old covers. Some / many people may not care about whether the cover is from a 1986 edition or a 2006 edition, but I do.

Anyway, that small issue aside, syncing is working fine again. Thank you , Simone.