Decluttered when ditched Devonthink for Obsidian

Software
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Exactly. I really can’t understand this philosophy.

As you said, I have work to do. The piece of software is a tool, that should be as intuitive as possible (even when it’s complex). If the tool tends to become another work in itself, I don’t have time or energy for that.

I’m writing this as a DT user. I have a huge PDF library on various and sometimes cross-cutting topics, and the added value of DT is/was to surface similarities and highly connected files. It works quite OK with DT3, and paying for the upgrade to DT4 (i-e adding my AI-keys that I’m also paying for) is not a big added value at the moment.

Also echoing the opening post: I’ve discovered Obsidian and use it for note creation.

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22

Irrelevant question.

Thanks for your clarification. I’ll give you ~5 minutes of my time to help you as that’s your expectation of the time it takes to help you.

FYI, when the forum question covered in the manual, more often than not the respondent willl give a reference page number or screen shot.

FYI there are many more DEVONthink users than DEVONthink support staff active on the forum.

Pity. Others have work to do also. Anyone using DEVONthink is most likely a very busy person with other responsibilities.

If using commercial AI services works for you, then great. Use them. I prefer as first step using my non-artificial intelligence and look in TOC or Index (if there is) or CTRL-F when reading a manual to find answers and guidance. Often when reading a manual, I’ll see something else of interest to continue learning. Still learning about DEVONthink after many years of use. Just me, I guess.

Menu: File → New Database → Specify Location in dialog box → Press “Create Button”.

That’s it.

All my databases are in one local folder ~/documents/DEVONthink.

You mention “creating databases”. I do hope you don’t create too many. I have only two in active use. one for projects I’m working on with content I work with, and anther big one with reference material. No indexing of files outside DEVONthink. I have other databases rarely opened that are archived stuff and only opened when needing to find/add/delete something.

Bad thing to do. Very bad. No wonder you have “reliability” issues.

Putting databases in a local folder that is synced with iCloud (or any sync service) is fraught with risk of data loss and mostly won’t work. This seems a self-inflected problem. See page 35 of 4.1 version of DEVONthink Manual:

Do not put your databases in the cloud: This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but you should never put your DEVONthink databases in any cloud-synced location, e.g., iCloud Drive, or you could irreparably damage them.

By the way, I have no idea what a “partition” is in iCloud is or how to delete it.

You can delete DEVONthink databases (which are in macOS “packages” in Finder by using Finder’s delete feature. Or in DEVONthink Menu: File → Delete Database.

Probably because you often leave databases “open”. Close them, or quit DEVONthink.

Sounds like you have a lot of databases. Wondering why.

Why did you import so many duplicates?

It does work. I haven’t a clue why not for you. Deleting duplicates covered in the DEVONthink which I’ll not replicate here.

Not something I have much experience with as I don’t index. Indexing is a complication which I avoid. See Page 85 of the DEVONthink Manual “INDEXING AND THE FILESYSTEM” where the questions you pose are answered in detail.

My best advise, don’t use indexing unless there is a reason and if you use indexing read about and understand indexing.

My five minutes is mostly up. So … I don’t use tags very much. They exist and I don’t mess with them. There is a lot of guidance in the DEVONthink Manual about tags. See page 18.

From page 20 copied here so I don’t have to re-write:

Deleting Tags and Tag Groups: Deleting individual tags from items is done via the same methods you apply them, e.g., in the Generic Info inspector. Deleting tag groups is done in the Tags group of the database. Simply select the unwanted tag and choose Data > Move to Trash. This immediately removes the tag from all them items it was applied to. And only the item references are moved to the Trash, not the original items in the database.

I’ve spent more than five minutes composing this reply. probably about 45 minutes interrupted by the cat wanting food and children waking up. No need to send me money.

I’m unaware of paid consultants, but that seemed to me to be a good question for an AI service. I tried Grok and got something which may or may not be a hallucination and more research probably needed:

https://x.com/i/grok/share/e3FlwFjS1s1HZiBuXdsU12pGY

If you want help from a forum, the DEVONthink forum is outstanding for that. But it’s not a charity service that you can get without your own effort and participation, especially when the questions asked are already covered in DEVONthink web site FAQ, and/or DEVONthink Manual–or previously on the forum. And the paid-for-by-DEVONtechnologies e-book “Take Control of DEVONthink” is useful. Or, even better, contact DEVONtechnologies Support direct for bespoke support.

Speed read this material to at least be slightly familiar with what is there for recollection and finding later to answer a specific question.

It’s not req’d to read the DEVONthink Manual to get started, but it does help a lot when getting started to read at minimum the section at the start “Getting Started”. For folks for which even that is too much, well …

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23

That was unnecessarily rude. If you have better things to do with your time, then please do them, but leave the condescending tone out of this forum. You do know that you don’t actually have to reply if you have nothing helpful to say, right? Better to attend to your cat or your family than be gratuitously rude to a fellow forum member.

P.S. I had to register an account just for this. This is an amazing community with so many helpful contributors, which makes bad apples stand out.

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24

Just to echo your points, I’ve had similar issues over the years I’ve never been able to get resolved. I always just assumed it was the side effect of a piece of software that does so many things.

My main two issues are, first, that DTTG has flat out never worked for me in terms of sync. I’ve tried every sync and storage option I have available to me but I still end up with piles of notes in my DTTG that will never sync with the main database.

The other issue is constant errors in the database related to missing files. No idea why, I don’t move them, but I get several random files missing per month. The Repair option doesn’t fix them, and when i go to manually “download” them (which I also don’t understand since they’re not online) the download option fails.

I’m not a huge mobile user so the former was not necessarily a deal breaker, but the latter just got tiresome. I never had it lose something truly mission critical, but losing files is clearly not great. At the very least it requires me to manually trawl and fix the database several times a year, which is the kind of time sink I can live without.

In terms of the forum, I always just put it down to cultural differences. Im British and here every sentence has to start and end with an apology, but I recognise that elsewhere its seen as better to save everyone’s time by being direct.

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25

Just think how much of this thread could have been avoided by heading the observation (warning) given at the start.

IYKYK

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26

This was the ultimate reason that I quit using DEVONthink. The EagleFiler app, which does everything for which I used the DEVONthink app, does not make false suggestions that one of my databases is still open. Neither do Apple’s apps that are based on an internal database.

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27

Sure it is. DT in all flavors can easily be replaced by Obsidian.

Yes, Right now I have Libre office files of all types, pdf, jpeg, png, js, avif, docx, webp, htm, xlsx, eml all in my vault.

I see this sentiment a lot but I strongly disagree after having done that for years but now moving to one big single place for everything.

The main reason for keeping clippings, and other documents it to ibe used in stuff I write or tasks I do. It’s reference material. Having to move in and out of multiple apps and searching and setting up appropriate metadata for those apps is painful and wasteful of my limited time. Knowing I can link to anything within Obsidian and if I open of click on the link the item opens up in either Obsidian directly for a lot of stuff or in the app without issues means I never have to really worry about where something is and I can use those other files in all the things I work on.

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28

I understand the lure of your disagreement, but I would find an Obsidian-like app awkward for ALL of my data storage needs.

For example, I have lots of information in spreadsheets and I have considered but rejected storing them in my EagleFiler everything bucket or in my NotePlan note taking app.

I’m comfortable storing some data files in their own Finder folders. And, seemingly, many people get by with no more organization than Finder folders alone!

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I think that Obsidian and DEVONThink cater to two separate crowds of people.

The draw for Obsidian appears to be its plugin ecosystem that allows you to construct your own experience, suited to your workflow and thought process. I’m aware that certain extensions were subsumed into the stock software but I can’t imagine what it’d be like for users if that’s all they had.

DEVONThink doesn’t feel like that at all. I think that there is a single sort of way that the developers expect users to handle the software—deterministically, dare I say. Meaning that your decisions made in DEVONThink are informed by some sort of prearranged demand or interest devised before you start importing documents into it. It’s expected that before you start doing things with the software that you know what you want to do at all.

Y’know I’m reminded of my first trip to an Apple Store with my father after pleading for a MacBook over breakfast that morning. We were greeted by an almost elvish-built man in a red Apple sweater (it was mid-November).

—For what; What do you do; Why?!
— I…I, uh, I wanna.

I was disarmed. I never thought I’d have to answer that…Dad figured I may have wanted to stick on Windows.

So yeah I think DEVONThink is overkill for a lot of people unless you have some well-defined, preferably complex kind of interests that you need to take care of and are willing to subject the fulfillment of these interests in part to the suite of functions that DEVONThink has to offer. My impression is that the breadth of documentation/support/third-party material is meant to facilitate this. You are being conditioned. Down to the quintessential German brusqueness of their customer support. You are being hardened.

For anything other than this I would direct someone toward software like EagleFiler, Notenik and Notebooks.

Here are some series of blog posts about DEVONThink that I found helpful when figuring out how to use it for my own cases.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150322173831/https://www.herberthallas.com/2015/03/using-devonthink-pro-with-zotero-for.html

This is a more recent series that I haven’t gotten around to checking out

https://www.ohrg.org/devonthink-part-i

https://www.ohrg.org/devonthink-part-ii

https://www.ohrg.org/devonthink-part-iii

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Do you need plugins to be able to view non notes? When I tried it out it simply didn’t show my other files in the vault.

And if it needs plugins, does it also work on mobile?