advice on leaving documents in Finder folders

hi,

i’ve been using DEVONthink for several months now, and am finally starting to put a lot of information into it. however, i’m trying to understand how (if?) i can make use of DEVONthink’s features but still keep my data accessible in the Finder. i have been importing items and telling Dt to use links to them, and that works well. but it would be great to have a way for Dt to notice when the contents of a folder have changed, or to be able to create a new group in Dt and have it appear as a folder in the Finder.

for example, i have a projects folder in the Finder. this folder has thousands of documents in tens of sub-folders. i need to be able to acces the folder in various ways, including over networks, so i can’t just copy everything into the Dt database.

i guess my basic question is this: is there some way to use Dt as a smart mirror of my Finder file structure? that way i could work in Dt when i’m at my computer, but would also still have access to all of my data when i’m remote.

thanks,
douglas

well, i’ve just been poking around a bit more and i see that the file->synchronize command seems to do what i’ve been looking for. not sure why i missed it before.

i also saw a previous thread that seemed to warn against relying too heavily on synchronize, so i’m not sure exactly how to proceed, but at least now i know it’s possible to keep folders/documents sync’d.

To make useful suggestions, it would help to know why you want to keep your data accessiible directly from the Finder.

because i need to access my data over networks when i’m not at my computer. so when i access my data remotely it has to be available as normal files, not as part of the Dt database.

Then I see two possibilities:

  1. Synchronizing (as has been discussed already)
  2. Regularly exporting the DT database to plain files for remote access

The second solution takes up more disk space, but it also serves as a useful backup.