How do you sync?
I use sync to my own WebDAV server and that, although a bit painful to set up, is flawless once configured correctly.
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I don’t miss hook on iOS. My iPhone and iPad are 99% consumption, communications, and note taking devices. I expect that will change post-Covid, and I’ll deal with that challenge then.
I’m more concerned about future proofing.
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I use iCloud, maybe that’s the issue.
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I routinely sync DEVONthink with four devices via local Bonjour, local NAS WebDAV (Synology), and Dropbox (for when I’m a road warrior). Works well. Bonjour method runs fast and well. Setup easy as described in the DEVONthink manual. Synology WebDAV needs a bit of network/server familiarity, but works great also for WebDAV and the other purposes to which I put it.
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I would say that it is. It seems like every sync issue I’ve ever heard of with DT is related to using iCloud. Anythign is better than that it seems.
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I use iCloud, and it works fine.
The most important thing is that your databases (the database files themselves) are not synced. So if you have Documents and/or Desktop syncing to the cloud, don’t put them there. Similarly, don’t put them in a Dropbox folder.
DEVONthink’s internal sync mechanism must do all syncing for it to work properly.
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not my experience. i have thousands of files in Dropbox that are indexed in DEVONthink.
To ameliorate my concern for my files, where is this discussed in the User Manual or other?
Not the files that are indexed, the databases themselves - the .dtbase2 files.
In case someone runs across this post in the future, see here.
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ah. yes. the database files should not be in Dropbox or any folder that is synced. spelled out in manual to put them in a folder under users home folder.
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Personal experience with DevonThink sync:
- Like most things with DevonThink, configuring it is not intuitive. It’ll take 15-60 minutes of reading the documentation and configuring it to get it working.
- But it’s not hard to do. If I can get it set up – and I did – anybody on this forum can.
- Once you get it configured, do not
optimizefiddle with it. Just leave it the heck alone. There are plenty of other things tooptimizefiddle with in DevonThink; amuse yourself with any of those. - It often does take a couple of minutes to get going. And that can seem like forever if you’re standing at your Mac and waiting for something to transfer over from your iPhone.
@omarruvalcaba That video is hilarious. Also, peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches are surprisingly tasty.
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Sync does seem slow, at least compared to web based competitors.
fast or slow is subjective. unless we are talking many GB to catch up on, i routinely synch my iphone with the iMac via Bonjour connection and it is really fast. i also sync via a synology WebDav server and it has little to do since Bonjour did it first. i also use Dropbox but then of course takes slightly longer as the internet involved. i think when people sync more than they really need to iphone and ipad then it can appear slow.
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I’ve been following the various threads in the forum on personal informational management systems such as Obsidian and Roam Research and I’m very interested. My needs are no where near that of others but the value is still there. One of the big questions for me is the value worth the effort. I would like to try and first utilizing my existing tools. Due to my cross platform needs I’m a heavy Evernote user. Does anyone have any experience trying to use Evernote for this purpose.
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I am an extremely heavy user of Evernote with thousands of notes and use it all day every day. Because the internal linking is so clunky I use it only on notes I’m actively working on. IMO Obsidian’s linking is vastly superior.
That said, I can’t get into Obsidian without a mobile app. I also prefer having all the files attached in the note I’m working on. Emailing items into the system is also critical to my workflow.
At this moment, I’m not adding another layer of something like Obsidian into my workflow.
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DEVONThink is great as a personal knowledge platform system.
My observation is that personal knowledge platform systems generally are used for some area of specialization and are accumulated over the years. That is not my use.
Yea. It kind of is clunky. The best you could maybe do is use filterize to keep a table of contents updated or automatically add tags.
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UPDATE: I’ve surrendered to DevonThink. I’ve gone back to it.
I kept on thinking of things I want to do, realizing that I know how to do those things in DevonThink, and then researching how to do them without DevonThink. Usually, I would find satisfactory workarounds. Sometimes not.
Several examples:
- Easily creating a daily note as a sort of bullet-like journal, and easily accessing that note throughout the day.
- Linking to individual paragraphs of a markdown file.
- Starting new Microsoft Word documents from templates.
- Adding comments and tags to a document, and then displaying those comments and tags in the documents list.
- Storing Microsoft Office documents, email messages, PDFs, and web pages alongside Markdown documents, in a single folder/group.
And so on.
I expect I can do everyone of those things without DevonThink, but I can also do them with Devonthink, so why waste time hunting for workarounds? And DevonThink, despite my earlier misgivings, is reliable.
However, having been through this exercise, I am more confident I can use DT in parallel with other applications, and even temporarily put aside DT and try out using another application as my primary document store, without too much difficulty.
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I recently moved from Bear to Apple Notes for all my notes. Last week I began to have regrets. The reason, I’ve become uncomfortable having my notes in a proprietary database system. I started considering other options including moving back to text files.
Over the holidays DEVONtechnologies put all their apps on sale at 30% off including upgrades. I took advantage of the discount and upgraded Devonthink to version 3 even though I wasn’t currently using it.
After moving my notes to text files actually, .md markdown files, I decided to put Devonthink to use. I indexed all my working files notes included to Devonthink. I chose indexing over importing so that the files would still be accessible in Finder.
Now, my bookmark collection, notes, personal files, research projects, and writing files are all in Devonthink.
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DEVONthink also stores it’s not in the finder. The documents themselves are human readable, although the folder hierarchy does not make sense to human, as far as I can see.
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Another thing I like to do with DevonThink: wikilinks. Again, several other applications support wikilinks, but those applications do not have the support for Microsoft office documents, PDFs, emails, and webpages that DEVONthink offers.
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