I am also an occasional DEVONthink (version 2) user, as I previously described here. Like @Bmosbacker and @Jeremy said, “I also use it as a tool, not as a full on repository”, which means I don’t store files in DEVONthink’s repository nor in a cloud service, but instead store files in the Mac file system and index them in DEVONthink. (See Douglas Barone’s classic 2009 essay “File System Infobase Manager” for more arguments in favor of the “good old file system”.)
My answers to @andy4222’s questions:
- “Is it worth the money?” I have found it to be well worth what I paid for it; I think it was $60 then.
- “Do I pay for the upgrade or is it free?” All of the upgrades within a major version were free. I am still using version 2, so I have never paid for an upgrade.
- “If I want to keep using the old version, how would that work…?” It has always been possible to download a disk image of DEVONthink from the DEVONtechnologies website and use it to reinstall on your Mac if necessary. This is how all apps were installed on Macs before the App Store, and it is still possible to install apps this way.
- “How does it compare to Evernote?” I don’t have much experience with Evernote, but an advantage of DEVONthink is that you can store all your files in the good old Mac file system as mentioned above.
- “How is the search?” It’s really great: it is the best way to quickly see the search results inside many kinds of files. Its “See also” suggestions of semantically similar files is also fantastic and a big reason to use it.
- “Is the app slow/bloated?” DEVONthink takes longer to launch whenever it periodically makes a backup of its database as I instructed it to do, but once launched it is a fast native Mac app. I love good native Mac apps, which is what DEVONthink is. Someone else described replacing DEVONthink with a different, non-native (Electron-based) app; I have tried that app, and I think it is the definition of bloated (over 300MB) compared to DEVONthink (60MB for version 2 that I use). An example of one of DEVONthink’s native Mac features is its excellent support for Mac file system tags, which (unusually) it can categorize in its database. Yes, you can categorize your categories in DEVONthink, which is more useful than it sounds.
- “FINALLY, how do you use it? What is the size of your database in it? What do you store in it and how do you backup?” I use it as an interface to my personal knowledge base. The database size (excluding backups, and also excluding the files that are indexed, which as mentioned are just stored in the Mac file system) is about 2GB. You can set how many automated backups of the database you want DEVONthink to make; I set it to make just one backup, and the database and its backup are themselves again backed up during my regular backups of my whole hard disk.
There has been a lot of discussion in this thread about data loss and DEVONthink, so I will note that I have never had data loss; the database did get corrupted once but I just replaced it with a backup, and it didn’t affect the files themselves since I just store the files in the Mac file system as mentioned.