iCloud sync works with MacBook and iPad, but not with iPhone

WLVA

Happy New Year! Thank you for developing and supporting Diarium. I appreciate that you provide affordable cross-platform journaling software untied to a subscription model. I downloaded Diarium on my Apple hardware and they seemed to be working fine. (I am using the most recent OS versions on a MacBook Air M1, iPad Pro 2018, and iPhone 14 Pro, and syncing with the same iCloud account.)

Tonight I bought the Pro versions for both macOS and iOS, on the MacBook and the iPad. The iPhone also recognized the IAP when I touched "Restore purchases."

However, iCloud sync is not working properly on the iPhone. To be specific, it shows entries through December 29, but not entries for December 31 or January 1. I suppose that must have been true before today, when I bought the IAPs, and I just didn't notice. I think December 29 is the date that I installed Diarium on the iPhone.

On the iPhone, I have tried the following to resolve the issue:

toggled iCloud sync off and on within Diarium
turned the iPhone off and on
force restarted the iPhone
uninstalled and reinstalled Diarium, making sure iCloud is on

What can I try next? Thanks again.

WLVA

Oh, no! The situation is now actually worse than I realized!

After attempting to resolve the iPhone sync issue on my own, my Mac now contains the "bad" version of my Diarium entries -- that is, it no longer has the entries I wrote on December 31 and January 1, and it has the auto-generated "My first diary entry" on January 1. Surely this must have happened when I uninstalled and reinstalled Diarium on the iPhone.

Fearing that I would completely lose what I had written previously, I turned on my iPad, immediately turned off WiFi, and verified that the iPad was now the only one of the three devices that had the correct database of journal entries. I then chose Dropbox as my sync method on the iPad (and only the iPad), re-enabled WiFi, and created a backup file on Dropbox. As far as I can tell, this is my only pristine copy.

So, until the iPhone sync issue is resolved, I now need to use Diarium only on the iPad. And I need to make sure that when I do later sync again with the other two machines -- with iCloud, because it allows me to use end-to-end encryption -- Diarium will accept the iPad database as the correct one.

timo

I am not sure if I understood the series of events correctly, but what happens when you follow these steps?

make a database backup on your iPad (in the app settings). With that, you always have a backup file that you can back to and re-import into the app
enable iCloud Sync on all devices (make sure you use the same iCloud account on all iOS and macOS devices)

Normally, when Diarium merges the local database with the remote database from the Cloud if it is not sure that the remote database contains the most recent data.

And regarding end-to-end encryption, there aren't really any differences between the sync options I would say. I am planning to roll out the Diarium E2EE this year, you can opt-in now with the instructions you find here

WLVA

Hi, this is a quick follow-up that I finally just followed the steps you suggested.

First, I made a backup of the good iPad data (I also transferred a copy of that iCloud backup to my Mac local drive, just in case).

Second, I enabled iCloud Sync on all devices (I have only one active iCloud account, so no confusion there). The Mac and iPhone were already set to sync on iCloud, so this was simply a matter of toggling the iPad to sync once again on iCloud instead of Dropbox. On sync, the iPad downloaded the auto-generated "My first diary entry" on January 1, but fortunately did not delete the other entries from that day and the end of December. The Mac also synced properly, after I pressed the Sync icon on the lower left. Finally, the iPhone synced properly, immediately upon opening the app.

I deleted the auto-generated "My first diary entry" and that change was recognized by all three systems.

I still don't know what was going on with the bad sync behavior earlier. I guess those are the risks of depending on cloud storage. I'm the sort of person who uses POP on my laptop so that my email messages get stored locally and are subsequently archived. I'll probably make occasional backups of my Diarium data and store them locally too.

As for end-to-end encryption, I'll just let iCloud handle it for now, although I'll be happy when it's handled by default within the app.

Thank you very much for your help!