I am very curious to hear from Rosemary Orchard on your challenges with DEVONthink.
That experience is quite consistent with my trials of DT. I know some people love it, but it has never stuck for me.
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Almost exactly why Iām trying Keep Itā¦
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Iām trying to keep it also, but trying to see how it can better serve my workflow. I donāt want to get stuck with an app that I barely utilize
ok iām about to be all in on Devon Think - i d/l an instance to my mac mini - as Iām one of the ones impacted by Evernote dying a slow death/having issues
i imported a few PDFs and I like what i see thus farā¦ my question is about storage/ and sync management and having DT installed on multiple machines
so I presume I always have to have enough local storage based on the size of my DT databases? how does cloud sync work can you not store data locally? Iām just a bit confused at the sync/storage concept
and Iām worried due to my 4k notes in EN ill quickly run out of HD space on my mini or mac air
If someone could explain how this works I would appreciate it
Thanks
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IMO, the recent versions made sync setup a lot easier to use when they got iCloud syncing to work. There are several other options available but they do take a bit of knowledge (IMO) to get them set up.
Basically, at least how I understand it, to sync a database you can either do a point-to-point sync between two devices or set up a repository to hold a copy of the data that each device syncs against. DT calls the latter respository a sync store.
A sync store can contain one or more database. Also, each device can sync all or a subset of the databases in each sync store that has been configured on the device. Lastly, you can choose whether to download the files or just the metadata when you set up syncing on secondary devices. I believe, if just the metadata is downloaded, the full file gets retrieved (presuming you have network access) on demand.
Presuming the sync store location has enough space, you could keep all use it to sync all databases then sync certain databases on devices with limited storage (sort of like Dropboxās selective sync feature; if you donāt sync a DB, it doesnāt exist on that device).
At one time, I was using multiple sync stores each containing one database. My sync store resided on a NAS in my house. This worked OK when I was home but had issues when I was off my home network.
With iCloud support added, I set up iCloud as my sync store for all databases and then point all devices at it. I have enough storage on each device got be able to keep full copies of all documents but it did make the initial sync for each device a long process.
Of course, people who donāt want to store a copy of their databases on a cloud service, they can set up one of the other options such as using a WebDAV server they control. I thought about it but, at least at the time, found it more work than I wanted to deal with given I currently donāt have anything that sensitive in DT.
JoePreiser has a good description of your choices.
In my case I run the Server app on my main iMac. Itās sole purpose is to run WEBDav for my sync of both DEVONThink and Omnifocus as I am very cloud adverse and do have lots of very sensitive information in both software packages. I put all my databases onto the DAV folder and sync to there. I have separated my databases so that the ones I wnat on my mobile devices are fairly small and the ones I only need access to on the macs are large.
I pull the full contents down into the mobile devices rather than waiting to pull the info down as I access it.
I know things would be a lot faster if I had a separate Mac to run the server app but all my other macs are in use and this works. Occasionally it gets slow but livable.
It is true that when I am out and about I cannot sync my devices but that isnt an issue for me as I can get back to my home base and sync easily. I could set it up so that my WEBDav is visible to theoutside network to give me mobile sync but I haven;'t botherd to yet as I donāt need it.
I only wish you could in the iOS Files App search for words inside the documents.