Is there a Document Management System, beside DT/DTTG?

Hi there! I recently bought Notebooks just because I saw it recommended many times here and I was tired of trying stuff and the app simply is great (goodbye bear, agenda and note plan). Also, I changed Devonthink for eagle filer, mostly because I want everything on the cloud. I see you mention that eagle filer and notebooks can coexist, how did you do it? I have my notebooks folder on icloud.

There’s some Terminal trickery involved because a “library” in Eaglefiler is a directory wich includes the data in a subfolder called “Files”. The trick is to make “Files” be a symlink to another iCloud Drive location (in my case, a directory in iCloud Drive root called PKM/PERSONAL, which I am targeting with relative paths --hence the …/…/ thing)

In macOS, Notebooks and Obsidian can also open the “iCloud Drive > PKM > Personal” folder with no tricks, and on iOS/iPadOS only Notebook can access that iCloud Drive location with a one-time purchase. Obsidian cannot and it was stated in the Obsidian forums that it would not access files outside the iCloud Drive Obsidian app folder. But for me this is more than enough as I do all my markdown/file wrangling on macOS and I get Notebooks/Obsidian/EagleFiler goodness at the same time.

Please note that EagleFiler will complain that some files are missing from its library if you remove/shuffle any Files with the Finder, Notebooks or Obsidian. I have safely ignored these warnings because my source of truth are the files themselves, not the indexes from any app.

If you are not comfortable running Terminal commands, I can try and come up with some guidelines to achieve this.

Back in the day when I was trying to learn org-mode and emacs I had to create a symlink from a folder in the iCloud Drive to the Documents folder, otherwise I would get an error in emacs when trying to save files (this because the weird ~symbols~ of the path to iCloud). So if the process is the same I think I can do it.

So:

  1. Create a New Library in Eagle Filer, maybe named “notebooks”
  2. Inside the Files folder of Eagle Filer add the symlink of my notebooks folder

Am I right?

I use a local folder with my EagleFiler app so I don’t do what you are asking. But the EagleFiler Manual has a dozen hits for the term symlink so you might try that approach if no one else can help you here.

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I will try that, thank you!

Not exactly. The Files folder needs to become the synlink to your notebooks folder (see my screenshot above).

Please close Eaglefiler, Notebooks and backup everything before attempting this!

Can you provide a screenshot of the paths of your notebooks and eaglefiler libraries?

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Hi! Well it was too cumbersome for me :frowning: , what I ended up doing is defining a new home directory for notebooks that is inside of the Files folder of Eagle Filer. For this I created a new library, just for notebooks. Everything seems to be working fine. I can see and edit all my contents in eagle filer and also in notebooks.

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With Advanced Data Encryption enabled, iCloud Drive is now E2E encrypted. Reliability is a whole different story though!

Thank you @pantulis for introducing the EagleFiler + Notebooks method. It really sounds like a great way to leverage the best of both apps.

I want to like DEVONThink 3, it definitely is featureful. But the UI is sort of brutal compared to DT 2.

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Another vote for Notebooks.

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Another vote for DevonThink!

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