With all of the posts on Devonthink data loss/corruption, I’m surprised folks are still recommending this.
Not seeing those posts anywhere or data loss/corruption here. Oh well. My bad, I guess.
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Not an indictment, and not directed at you. Just a thought. There are threads in both forums.
That bug only affected people who accumulated data in the DT2 days and stored/synced it a certain way during the transition to DT3. The people affected are rightfully upset, but it’s not relevant to most users.
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And resolved a very long time ago. More info on the DEVONthink forum from those days long ago.
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I stopped using DT back at v2, but as far as I’ve been able to find out, DT still complains about databases already being open after restarting the Mac while recovering from any kind of forced shutdown, crash, or freeze.
I’d love to hear that this no longer happens.
It doesn’t happen to me with EagleFiler (my DT replacement). Somehow, EF manages to close up and/or recover from problems in an orderly fashion without warning me about possible data corruption.
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It’ll still warn you about that.
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Dang, that’s really unfortunate and disappointing to hear. 
I don’t think anyone’s harmed by it, since you’ve moved on. EagleFiler has a different manual crash rebuild/verification workflow but neither it nor DT need it most of the time.
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The warnings are in your best interest. But as @cornchip says, as you moved on it does not matter.
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Just trying to slip in a warning for new users or those considering a move to DT. (Obviously, I know that I am no longer affected. C’mon, guys!)
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Yes, sorry, of course you do know and I didn’t say that well. I just meant that for people who like DT’s philosophy, the non-closed database warning after a crash is just one more thing it does right. People who don’t like DT would be the ones that see that warning as just another paper cut. DT and EagleFiler both do a great job recovering from system crashes under the hood.
We benefit from the whole spectrum of opinions here about every piece of software in the Apple ecosystem here, for sure.
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I don’t think it was the issue itself as much as it was Support/Devs being pretty aloof about it and users kind of having to “prove” there was an issue. Very relevant when archiving years of data. See current discussion.
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Database software has traditionally been subject to open/closed file issues. No software is perfect, but with DEVONthink, I’ve long been waiting for an advance like this feature claimed by the in-memory database Panorama X. After all, the Finder doesn’t lose data on a crash. Neither does BBEdit, just to name a couple of notable examples.
Total Recall Auto-Save/Crash Recovery - Panorama X - PDF page 66
FWIW, I managed an email server for 14 years or so that stored all mail in MBOX/sliced MBOX files. In fact the entire datastore was plain text files, it used no databases. It was the most reliable server I ever used. We never had a single software or file problem.
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DT isn’t losing data in these situations. It’s just scrupulous about warning you that you are entering a situation where data loss could occur (two computers using a one database) or could have occurred (the computer crashed in the middle of saving the file you were using.)
It’s the scrupulousness and particularity in DT’s UX that rubs people the wrong way, not the performance-durability-replicability tradeoffs it makes.
The recent advances in conflict-free replicated data are promising and will be changing what those tradeoffs look like as they mature work their way through legacy software. That’ll be a better fit for DT’s data than something like a write-ahead log in a traditional database or Finder’s lower performance durability that doesn’t really handle multi-user/multi-process conflicts.
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No this behavior hasn’t changed and it’s not something to ignore.
If your machine or DEVONthink has terminated abnormally, it should be looked into.
This also goes for why you’d force quit the application.
And the warning is to let you know, something unexpected happened, so you should be aware of it.
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A warning about what specifically? That DEVONthink is diligent in letting people know something has gone awry and potentially has affected the data? Note: potentially.
We not only consider it good form to alert the user, we also want them to be thinking about, *“Oh yeah, the thunderstorm knocked out the power last night! I hope that didn’t cause any issues!”, etc.
PS: Upon reopening database, DEVONthink does a verification to determine if there is any detected damage or inconsistencies in the database. If there are, you’ll be prompted and Window > Log should report in more detail.
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I get everything you said. But for all the years I’ve used or watched DT, I’ve kept hoping that this recovery process would be improved to give ordinary users more confidence in the safety of their data.
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A warning about an inability to positively and confidently deal with what is an all too often occurrence. This frustrating behavior was what pushed me to eventually quit the app when v3 came out. If nothing else, the UI could be improved to give more detail so that a user better understands what has happened.