Big notes, big PDFs, big vaults

Sempere is built for vaults of thousands of notes and gigabytes of attachments. A few habits keep it quick.

Limits

PDFs

• A long PDF (a textbook, a stack of slides) opens fastest as its own note, made with Import PDF…, rather than inserted into an existing note.
• If you only need some chapters, make a smaller PDF first and import that.
• The pages’ text is extracted for search when you import, which takes a moment for large files.

Dense pages

Pages with very many strokes (heavy shading, many layers of highlighter) take longer to draw when you open or zoom them. Sempere caches drawn pages; Settings ▸ Backups & History ▸ Storage shows the Drawing Cache and Attachment Cache and can Clear Caches if space is short (they rebuild as needed).

History

Every save adds a small file. Thinning (Settings ▸ Backups & History ▸ Version History ▸ Thin Autosaves Older Than, 30 days by default) keeps a note’s folder from growing without end. Never keeps everything, at the cost of space and slower syncing of very old, very busy notes. The Thin Now buttons below it (Thin versions older than 30 days…, Thin everything except checkpoints…) show what they would remove before removing anything. The first keeps saved versions and the last autosave of each editing session; the second keeps only saved and imported versions and the newest version of each note.

Attachments you no longer use

Deleting a picture from a page does not delete its file right away, because older versions of the note still show it. Storage ▸ Unused Attachments finds attachments that no note uses; they can be deleted 30 days after they were first found unused.

Many devices

Each file’s header holds one entry, sealed to the vault key, whatever the number of devices, and adding a device rewrites no file. Removing a device or replacing the kit is quick too. Only Re-encrypt Everything… rewrites every file, which takes a while and uses the network for every file on every target.

Space and downloads

• Every device holds the whole vault, attachments included, so keep enough free space for it. Settings ▸ Backups & History ▸ Storage ▸ This Vault and Its Sync Targets shows the sizes.
• The first sync on a new device downloads everything. From WebDAV, the list appears in seconds from the server’s encrypted summaries and the notes fill in, then the attachments; a note you open first is fetched on its own. Let it finish on Wi-Fi.
• iCloud Drive may keep files only in the cloud on a device; Sempere asks iCloud for them and waits. The bar says how many are still on their way.

Recognition after a big import

After importing hundreds of notes, run Handwriting ▸ Recognize N Notes Now while the device is plugged in, or on a Mac sempere recognize --all --missing-only.