Unable to run SQL / BEGIN EXCLUSIVE errors [A: another app deleted OF’s cache]

At radom times I will get the following error:

The document “OmniFocus” could not be saved. Unable to run SQL for statement ‘BEGIN EXCLUSIVE’.

I haven’t been able to determine what is causing it and it can get frustrating when it pops up after entering a number of tasks into the quick entry. Why you ask? Because, when this error pops up it will not save the work i just did. I have to restart OF and reenter everything (hopefully).

Does anyone else experience this and what (if any) is the solution to make it stop happening?

Thanks Mike

Sorry for the trouble! In our experience, this is almost always caused by Clean My Mac (or a similar app) deleting OmniFocus’ cache while we’re still using it, causing this error to pop up.

In our testing, even if Clean My Mac is set to not disturb any OmniFocus files, it still deletes the active cache file. The workaround is to only run the cleaning routine when OmniFocus is not running. Hope this helps!

Thank you. i do have Clean My Mac… and now that you mention it, I had cleaned it yesterday and I had the SQL error pop up. I wonder if I can setup some sort of script within Keyboard Maestro to automate the process of syncing OF, shutting it down and then firing off Clean My Mac.

Thank you for the reply as this was very frustrating.

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Hi, Brian! I have been using OF2 since April and I never had any issues, however in the last 2 weeks I have been receiving “Saving to Omnifocus Cache” messages overtime I will mark a task complete or even when I am making a new one.

I have followed a procedure to manually clean the cache folder and now I got this message about BEGIN EXCLUSIVE and after restarting OF2 the “Saving to OMnifocus Cach” is still showing.

I do not have no application like Clean My Mac or similar ad I am running Yosemite.

Can you help me?