I have been a MAC user for about 6 years now and am generally pretty tech savvy. I have a very large (@4500) library of pdf.'s docs and other files accumulated over the years that I had organized on the MAC into an indexing system. Searching with Spotlight was a nightmare and I was glad to find Devonthink. I have been transferring everything over to DTPO, dropping folders and individual folders into the Global in-box and then moving them (using the action drop down menu) to a second database directly to folders that are the indexing system that I rebuilt inside DTPO.
No problems accessing, no problems searching, all the files can be found and the path names where they are located are correct. (although curiously many files appear to have been duplicated where I want them replicated).
But when I do ‘verify and repair’ it tells me I have 4308 orphan files. Please tell me there is an easy way to rectify this - it took me over a week to transfer the database as it was…
There’s a discussion of orphan files in the user documentation PDF. Follow the link from the Download page of the DEVONtechnologies Web site. That information is also available under the Help menu of your DT application.
You will find the orphan files listed in the “Orphans” smart group. Basically, you can select all of them, export them to the Finder and reimport them, or move them to the appropriate database.
thanks Bill. I have since discovered (I think) that the orphan files were not the ones I had already indexed but the remaining ones on my drive. There are some I had planned to move over enventually, so that was good since there are several duplicates.
But there are some I had chosen not to index: photos, tiff files and mxd (esp the latter since DPTO seems not to be able to read them) and left them in a separate database on the MAC. Is there a way to activate the verify and repair function so it doesn’t go after files outside a database?
The Index and Import commands affect only those files and/or folders that had been selected, and do not affect other folders and files on a drive.
Likewise, Verify & Repair affects only the contents of a database, not the external environment of your computer such as other items on your hard drive.
I managed to deal with most of the orphan files, (I see now they were in the database as you pointed out, just not visible in my index system, hence orphan) I went through the orphan files and deleted every file that had been corrupted or could not be read --but when I tried verify and repair again there are a 114 files that DPTO can’t repair – they are mostly geo-tiff files (and a few pdfs) that were in a folder I had transferred to Devonthink from the MAC database.
The log shows their location and path – for example DATABASE.database2/files.noindex/tif/8/102_geo.tif
Is there a way I can track them down and delete manually? They do not show up in the smart folder of orphan files. Or some other way to get rid of them? I tried TOOLS-> Rebuild Database, but DTPO exported, and then when importing froze at around the last 120 files or so (I imagine the same ones that it can’t repair). I imported the tiff files very early on when building the index so I doubt I have a backup from that does not contain this problem
Thanks for your help - in every other respect I am finding it an incredibly useful software
