Long desire to ditch devonthink. Finally made move after prolong unhappiness with bugs and bad attitude support person. Moved on, not revisiting bad experiences.
Did plenty research on MPU, chose Obsidian. 2 weeks Obsidian usage exceed expectation, wonderfully designed & executed app. Major bonus in switching app’s change to reduce notes & files roughly 60%. One time effort moving data → remove notes & files no longer needed. Should have done this years ago. Astonished by amount of ‘things’ saved that haven’t been touched! Estimate <10% of files being regularly used this year. Next project’s decluttering trunk of truck - likely be able to rid of 90% there.
My personal philosophy is that storage is so cheap that I never throw out anything that might have even a small amount of future value. The trick is to figure out how to store things out of the way (to reduce clutter) but still be retrievable. I do have DEVONthink and looked at Obsidian, but find that the built in Finder search does a fine job locating decades old files on my Mac mini server. It’s just a matter of determining when to archive finished projects and old data like emails.
To be fair, I think the customer support for DEVONthink is good. I always get quick polite responses. DEVONthink is complex software and there will always be some people are having issues however they provide a very extensive help section, a regular blog, tutorials, have a dedicated forum, and the customer support I’ve always experienced has been excellent.
Experience with DT support has been terrible. Founders were ok but support person is terrible. Buggy DT DTTG apps - latest example reported DTTG bug August 3 not addressed till today. They rather focus on users paying for new release. Have dumped DT DTTG to Obsidian - don’t want to derail thread revisiting bad experiences. Extremely happy with Obsidian and plan to soon pay VIP tier.
Did you dump both DT4 and DTTG - were you just a DTTG user?
Standalone DTTG might arguably be a Obsidian competitor - it certainly is not Devontech’s main focus.
DT4 is not a competitor to Obsidian. If you dumped DT4 for Obsidian and you are pleased with the outcome , then that’s great you found a good fit. I don’t think it says anything negative about DT4 - it’s just not an app for your use case.
What are you using to sync? I use DEVONthink to go and find the sync store works very well with WebDAV but also a huge pain.
I’ve tried obsidian and think mobile app is very good, but every time I try it I get errors with iCloud syncing. I tried remotely save over WebDAV and always end up with issues with plugin syncing and/or versioning. After your post I went back to test obsidian with the Synctrain iOS app and sync thing and going ok x2 days, but small library. Self-hosted live sync always gives me errors and too finicky for real notes.
Obsidian paid sync seems to be the way to go, but I like self hosting and keeping data on prem.
Decluttering not isolated to storage size. Going through old files & data made me realize I have improved thinking skill and optimized process even though was slow changing myself. All of us improve through years of learning & experimenting - some faster than others.
Thank you for this post. I have been trying for years to get Devonthink working reliably. I purchased David Sparks Field Guide and spent a lot of time trying to get it working correctly.
I was worried that it was just me when I experienced the attitude of the support forums. I could not understand why they had such a snarky attitude, then I saw that the company was based in Germany and it all became a bit clearer. Not sure it was all cultural differences vs just a bad attitude.
Can Obsidian easily store different types of files.
Specifically, what were the symptoms of “unreliability”?
Did you review the DEVONthink Manual, “Help” which is same content as the Manual, or the free “Take Control of DEVONthink” or direct to support. I see you dislike their forums.
After doing these things, what didn’t help? Or if not done, curious why not done.
I’m not sure that David Sparks’ Field Guide would be the first place to turn, but then I did not buy it so don’t really know.
Note Taking, in my opinion, works best with two separate apps. I recommend an app like Obsidian be kept for notes that you write yourself and another app, like EagleFiler (if you don’t get on with DevonTHINK), for storing documents like receipts, clipped articles, and much, much more.
You can take notes in DEVONthink. I use DEVONthink every day, but not for note-taking—for that I use Obsidian. (I don’t find DEVONthink a congenial place for writing in general, so I use other tools for document creation.)
Attitude - instead of just answering the question which would take 5 min the reply “is a did you read the manual.” I have work to do, if there is a steep learning curve I tend to move on.
The one thing that I have found that was helpful is to upload the manual to ChatGPT and PDF Pals so that I can query the manual to get the answers quickly.
If they would just answer the question in the forum then it would be available for others.
The creation of the databases should be easy but there are details about how you set them up. It would be great if the install set it up for you. It could prompt you as to where you want to put it and then put it there. I created the special partition in iCloud, I would like to start over but I don’t know how to delete it, I called Apple Support and they directed me to the developer
I often get “the database appears to be open” messages.
I have hundreds of duplicates and the delete Dups options does not seem to work in DTTG.
I believe that there are 3-4 key points that I am missing about the software that if I could talk to someone and understand them I might actually be able to use the software. For example, if you index the files and they get out of sync because you move them in finder how do you tell DT where the new location is?
I have posted on MPU and the DT forums to see if there are any consultants for hire. I am willing to pay $125/hr.
I would like to use tags in DT and finder but when I installed DT I must have had a setting wrong because it created thousands of tags that showed up in finder and that I could not delete in finder. I could not find a way to delete them easily in DT, I was also worried that I might be deleting the actually file.
Not sure of the point of the note that states support folks are real people who want to spend time with their families.