I have an archive of collected files that is now almost 800G in size. I’ve discovered that this amount of data, of every type, is inordinately difficult to manage and I’ve attempted various schemes to make it reasonable.
If only the Finder had true replicants and tagging, my job would be solved. And yet, despite all the various tagging and file mangement apps out there, nothing so far is able to help me with this amount of stuff.
What I’d really like is just multiple directory hierarchies onto the same files. DEVONthink comes close to providing this, with its replicants and implicit tagging, but if I try to import all this data into DEVONthink I end up with a database that’s way too big and slow to be usable. So I have little DT database strewn throughout the current hierarchy, to make areas more manageable.
The reason I bring this all up is that I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to extend DT to handle this scenario. All I really need is an import option that says “ignore contents”. That is, even if it’s a PDF or webarchive or whatever, don’t make any attempt to read the words in the document. Just maintain it as an opaque blob until I uncheck this setting in the info panel.
It seems that DT does a very good job of just managing plain files that it can’t see into, like .dmg or .zip, etc. It’s just all the PDFs and web pages that I have – and which I don’t want indexed sometimes – that prevent me from just throwing this entire thing into a giant database.