I can’t determine any rhyme or reason for this happening. They are all in the same folder.
I have Pathfinder but I believe that these came as a result of Finder but I can not be sure.
This can happen to me when I mistakenly click a download link more than once. The file system just adds a new instance of the same file and appends the -n counter.
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Unfortunately this is more than just a one off duplication, it’s through my whole file system on iCloud.
Does anyone know what the macOS criteria is for when it prompts about copying whether you want to overwrite the file or putting a number at the end and making a duplicate file -1.
No, I’ve never been sure when it will overwrite vs append a new number. Generally, saving from an application gives an overwrite warning and a dialog box to manually rename, but non-user-guided duplication seems to result in appended numbers. I’ve also seen it happen when there are sync hiccups. The OS defaults to saving more copies in lieu of losing data. That’s a good design, except when it keeps spawning copy after copy.
Were you working with the files on different systems about the time when new versions were created? That may point to a (temporary) sync problem.
I do have iCloud Drive on my PC but there are way too many of them, I am not on my PC that much any more these days.
Do you think that it might be DevonThink?
DevonThink is certainly a possibility. Anything that syncs is a possible culprit, and a database that syncs is especially vulnerable. If the duplicated files are stored or accessed in DevonThink, I’d start my research there. There are active forums for it that might help. If I recall from when I was using DevonThink, there also is a log function that might show sync problems.
Hazel can cause issues like this if you have a rule that recursively processes the same file name (e.g. i had an issue downloading duplicate payslips, and the duplicates incremented but one on the suffice like you describe).
Are you indexing files into DEVONthink?
Yes, I have just been using the index function vs bringing them into a database.
No, I have recently started importing the files into DevonThink.