Mysterious duplicate files on my Mac

Here’s a shot in the dark for you.

When working on my Mac in files on iCloud Drive (and indexed into DEVONthink), sometimes the files get duplicated.

I can discern no pattern to this. Sometime soon I’ll break out the scientific method to figure it out, but it’s so inconsistent that even gathering data on different scenarios will be extremely tedious. My suspicion is that it’s something to do with iCloud, because this didn’t previously happen on Dropbox.

It’s not really a problem. I just delete the copies and move on. Still, if someone else has experienced this and resolved it before, I’d love to know what’s going on.

Possible a local time machine backup

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I have a similar issue. I believe it’s caused by conflicts between how iCloud Drive and DT sync. I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that one of them detects a file in a part-synced state and interprets it as a new file.

I didn’t see this on DT2 - only on DT3, and I suspect that it’s related to the change in DT3 in which indexing became a 2-way feature 9 changes in DT are synced back to the Finder.

Have you asked on the DT forums?

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Ah, this makes sense. I haven’t, only because I didn’t think it was DT. I’ll post there later and see what they say!

I had terrible trouble with DT2 indexing files that were synced with Dropbox. Dropbox would sync them, then I would open DT2, then Dt2 would sync over WebDAV and revert them. Big sync conflicts constantly. Abandoned this approach quickly.

Interesting, because I never had issues before DT3 + iCloud!

Computers. We’ll just never know how they really work…