DevonThink Consulting

I have a few thoughts, when I get back to my mac I’ll write them out a bit more in depth.

Basically, if I were you, I’d step away from the computer and grab a pen and paper and write out a few things. Make it a mind map, outline, or whatever suits you best, but answer these questions.

  1. What am I responsible for?
  2. What do I need to track, and why?
  3. For the things I need to track, what is my ideal goal for how to track it?

Once you have the answers to those questions you should start to see a hierarchy that reflects the reality of your life.

Next, I’d list out the places for the information to live. Still in pen and paper! For example, I might put task management in Omnifocus, and reference documents in Finder. The important thing is not the applications, but the mental model for how you want to interact with your computer and your data.

I say “if I were you”, but the truth is this is exactly what I’ve done in the past. I had to simplify, simplify, simplify till I could wrap my head around what I had and where it was. It’s the only way I could manage a full time job, teaching part time at the community college, managing my home, and raising my family.

For more specific answers, I’ll post again later.

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Nuts, I thought you were posting this thread to offer DevonThink consulting!

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My 2¢:

I bring all my documents into DT. That way I get the encryption and sync benefits, and I’ve always been confused by how much DT interacts with the indexed documents.

Of DT in general?

There’s a smart folder for Duplicates in DT, you can drag all the duplicates out of DT to the Finder to back up, then select them all and run the “Move Duplicates to Trash” script that comes with DT.

I’ve never run across this, but again you can drag and drop everything out of your database to the finder, destroy the database, create a new one, then drag all your files back into it. Kind of a nuke and pave approach, but it’ll work.

Yep, you can just drag and drop documents into and out of DT to the Finder.

Set up Sync with whatever backend you want, I use iCloud CloudKit, and it works fine. You can pick and choose which databases you want on each device. I download just about everything to all devices.

This might be a good use for Hazel, if what you mean is how to get the documents out of the different app directories in iCloud. The best approach is to reduce the number of places where data can live.

Printing the page to PDF should do this. Or importing it into DT as a PDF.

PDF, that ensures you get the original content in an open format and aren’t reliant on the Internet keeping the content around.

@MacSparky Field Guide in 4…3…2…1…

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yep, I read that the night I got DT.

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Do note that duplicate detection in DT is weird and doesn’t work the way most would think, but works The One True Way that DT thinks is right. It is based on the rendered version of documents like markdown, rather than the source.

One of many of my annoyances with DT.

I agree with @ibuys ‘ recommendations above, develop your systems and mental models, then select tools that can help implement those systems.

As has been discussed before, Devon Technologies is one of the Henry Fords of “artisanal” software development. They produce software they think works the way you want, and generally are not open to feedback about what people actually need.

People have also experienced unexplained data loss (files being emptied of their contents). There were no indications from DT that it had corrupted the files, and in some cases the corrupt files were discovered after old backups had been overwritten, leaving no way to recover.

For me, DT has trust level 1 out of 10. I only keep things in it (or indexed by it) that I can recreate from other sources if needed. For instance, I store invoices for autographs I’ve bought to which I’ve added pictures of the autographs. I could recreate those from the auction’s website or from paper records. On the other hand, I would never let DT touch my source code, figures, writing, etc. for my research.

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I believe this happened once in the entire history of Devonthink - and they implemented a fix very rapidly which restored almost everyone’s data.

It’s hard for me to think of any software or hardware with a better track record than that. Even Amazon AWS - at a much higher price point - has suffered unrecoverable data loss. To me, if I put my critical data in a DT3 database and then zip that database and archive it on a NAS drive and somewhere in the cloud, that’s as close to rock-solid data storage as I can possibly imagine and fit for anyone other than maybe a national intelligence service.

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and following up on that, on their forum it is uncountable how many times the response to a suggestion or bug report was “will be in the next version” or something like that.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of moving files into the database vs just indexing.

OBTW, Thanks for your input.

According to them, it has not been fixed. They have a workaround that relies on your having a backup. They do not know what caused the problem.

From this thread:

We still have not located the root cause of this effect but firmly believe that it is caused by an issue in earlier versions of DEVONthink To Go 2.

  1. Identify the corrupted documents and try to replace them from your backup, best on a Mac or on another iOS device not affected.

And here’s a very long thread discussing the problem.

Due to this reminder of data loss, today I moved all my data out of DT, deleted all databases, and set up a DT_safe_store folder. Into that folder, I have ChronoSync do an hourly one-way copy of data from my working folders. I then created a new database that only indexes the data within those folders. This allows me to continue to use DT’s “See Also” function, without it having access to my working data.

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I’m having a hard time understanding why you don’t stop using it given the risk your perceive and report.

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See Also is helpful.
As I’ve said, it’s fully quarantined now, and I can continue to get some value for the $300 or so that I’ve spent on it.

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Your quotes are from February 16th (when the problem reared it’s head). Since then there have been ~ eight DTTG updates and I don’t believe the problem is still an issue

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Let’s hope.

The second thread I linked above shows it’s still a problem as late as June. There may be others who haven’t discovered their data is corrupt.

If I were them and had a locked post about my software causing data loss, I would certainly update it when the cause was found. But I don’t think the cause was ever found (I’m happy to be updated). To me, that is disconcerting. If they reused code or logic, that same problem could be in DTTG 3 or elsewhere, but at this point I don’t think they know.

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I would trust DEVONThink with my life…and, indeed do. :grinning: I have 60+ years of daily diary (journal) entries in one database—and many other databases with other critical information. I have never epxerienced any data loss.

Stephen

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Treating the underlying source of files as the determinant of duplicates is not the expected behavior from the majority of our user base, hence the default behavior (noting the behavior is from us listening to our user base, not merely an individual opinion).

However, there is a hidden preference coming in the next release to index the raw source of Markdown files.

PS:

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Have you read this in DEVONthink’s Help or manual: Help > Documentation > In & Out > Importing & Indexing, especially the Indexing and the filesystem section?

This is a must read, especially if you’re indexing items in cloud-sync locations.

There was one the day before you made this post. DTTG 3 is corrupting files - #270 by OogieM - DEVONthink To Go - DEVONtechnologies Community

More properly, workarounds, as the cause is still unknown.

Finally, the problem I reported with duplicates involved files that had different links with the same display text.

So files that differed like this:

[bookends](bookends://sonnysoftware.com/77131)

and

[bookends](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PTWF1DF)

would be treated as duplicates.
If I, for instance, saw those two files listed as duplicates, I might delete one or the other thinking they are actually duplicates, when in fact one was correct and the other not.
I’m surprised the majority of users would want this behavior.

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These type of issues are why I stick to a straight-forward “anything bucket” program like EagleFiler. The documents and other files that I entrust to it remain normal files in the Mac operating system, so they can be be edited by the best app of that file type on my Mac, keep their version history, and do not lock me into a proprietary system. The program may not be as fancy as DT3 , or DT2 which I used to use, but it offers good import options, flexible organization, search, and tagging. There is no syncing which some see as a downside, but its simple design makes it is hard to see how I could ever lose anything.

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I have been finding myself in similar spots and working to isolate a better solution.

Having been through some of what you are experiencing here are a few discoveries to keep in mind.

Anything from the iOS camera roll with DevinThinkToGo (DTTG) will be slow…it only lets you import one blasted photo at a time…might be as many as 7 taps to net a single photo…deal breaker on my side.

I lost information years ago when a similar program went under and I never had an export. DevinThink will not have that as bad of a problem and I mention because it forced me to come up with my own system that has no dependencies…and it took time and effort.

I think you might be able to find opportunities to accomplish the same needs with less effort that you will need to put in for DevonThink, especially if you are already looking to hire someone to get you set up.

DevonThink isn’t a magical answer to manage data, it is one tools to help.

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