Question: Why doesn’t Notebooks provide automatic sync with WebDAV servers, just as it does with Dropbox?
Contrary to Dropbox, a WebDAV server does not allow us to poll its contents to quickly find out what has changed. So Notebooks needs to retrieve the server’s complete index and look at each document individually. Depending on the number of documents and books, that may take anything from a few seconds to a few minutes.
There is a second aspect: to reduce the risk of conflicts during sync, the user must not edit any document while Notebooks is looking for changes on the server. In other words, Notebooks is in read only mode during sync.
With this in mind it is easy to see that an automatic sync during startup or shutdown is not a user friendly option. Allowing the user to define when a sync takes place seems like the better approach.
That being said, we know that automatic WebDAV sync is desirable, and we are still trying to find solution.