I’ve spent a few years cultivating a setup I’m genuinely happy with, but there are some friction points that one inevitably encounters with any knowledge system. So I’m both interested in sharing my own progress and also seeing how others navigate some of the problem areas in their own setups.
My system has two pillars:
DEVONthink is where I capture, distill, and archive information-dense material. The sync is excellent, it handles large file collections gracefully, and the UID linking makes for easy access.
Collections Database serves as a global relational index on top of DEVONthink. It’s fast, easy on the eyes, mobile/touch friendly, and makes things easier to navigate and discover. I have databases for people, books, articles, and other record types, with explicit relationships between them along with various metadata fields. When I open a person’s record, I see every book, article, and item associated with them—most of which contain URLs to the accompanying files in DEVONthink. Both apps support UID linking on desktop and mobile, so that connective tissue is what makes this possible. Collections allows for a certain kind of nimble browsing and curated discovery that I just can’t get with a deep, surgical environment like DEVONthink.
I tried ditching Collections and leaning more into DEVONthink’s discoverability tools, but See Also, AI clustering, tags, etc. are emergent and probabilistic. They surface connections I didn’t know existed, which is still valuable, but Collections gives me relationships that I deliberately construct. Both matter, and I don’t feel that they’re substitutes for each other. Additionally, DEVONthink’s tags are siloed to a single database. Because I work across multiple databases, I have no native way to maintain a global index of something like People — who appear across every domain I work in. Collections solves this. Also, DEVONthink’s custom metadata, while excellent, is not as versatile as a traditional database.
I’ve also looked seriously at Obsidian bases but have personally found it best for journaling exclusively. The vault architecture is more flexible and bases are really powerful, but Obsidian for me is not optimal for heavy file work or deep relational data. At the file sizes I’m working with (videos etc.), Obsidian’s iCloud sync requires downloading the complete database to a mobile device, and Obsidian Sync has a storage cap that is too low. DEVONthink’s sync handles this problem more adeptly at scale.
Pairing DEVONthink with a relational database has been a powerful combination that has stuck with me in a way that other setups have not, but finding the right dance between the two has taken some real effort. They contain complementary data quite optimally but at the expense of pruning two gardens. Both apps have deep automation support, and I think this is probably where the where the answer lives for truly optimizing this pairing. Collections has comprehensive Shortcuts integration as does DEVONthink to Go. DEVONthink is highly scriptable on the desktop but lacks Shortcuts support, so any automation I build for mobile won’t carry over to the desktop—something to figure out.
Given that, I’m curious about automation strategies for these apps. Capture is one problem area. Items can enter the system from either app, so I need a way for example to add something to DEVONthink and have a parallel Collections record created, with UID links automatically populated in both places.
I can offer more specific workflow friction points, but I’m also more broadly curious about how others manage parallel data sets across multiple apps and devices—particularly for long term knowledge and research work.