I have noticed for some time that it looks like some tags appear automatically in the tags folder. Some tags contain folders; other tags are actual folders I have elsewhere in my setup. If this is an automatic feature, is there a way for me to disable this feature? If it is not an automatic feature, how can I go about solving this doubling of information?
I can think of a case where this happens. If I have a group set to “include” for tagging, drag test group to be a child of an indexed group, and the move that group externally (i.e., make it into an indexes group), then the group names become tags. This is because DEVONthink creates Finder tags on export of a group or document. And Finder tags are added to the Tags group.
There is a “hidden setting” to prevent this. See Hidden Preferences in Help or the Manual for the DisableFinderTags setting. Another way to prevent it on a case by case basis is to not enable groups-as-tags – a global setting for individual databases, or a per-group setting in the contextual menu.
Thanks, Korm. I opted for manual removal of the additional files.
I could not find the Hidden Preferences. I searched in Help in the toolbar, and I could only find Preferences, but not Hidden Preferences. For now, this is fine though.
This is buried in Help – open DEVONthink Help and navigate the links in the Help panel from Documentation then to Appendix and finally to Hidden Preferences.
Can someone remind me where is the contextual menu? I still need to figure out how to disable the automatic tags.
I wanted to delete the tags, and all documents as well as the tags ended in the trash. Why? None of the files are in indexed folders. All are saved in DTPO, not in Dropbox or Google Drive, etc. The tags were so many (900+) and not useful at all, so I wanted to get rid of them. I tested this out first by creating a plain text file tagging it with a test tag, and deleting the tag. The item remained. But when I did that for all tags, the documents ended in the trash. Why? Now I have to sort so many documents in their folders.
When you Tag a file, a type of replicant is placed in the Tag group. This is not the file itself. If you delete a Tag group, you would see the replicants in the group but again, they are not the Tagged file… unless you had a Tag selected and specifically created the files in it. This is possible to do, but unadvisable.
That can’t be the whole story. I had drafts of papers that were in the Trash! They have never been tagged.
I cannot find the contextual menu to disable the groups-as-tags function. Does anyone know where it is?
There is no contextual menu to diable groups as Tags on a global basis. You can right-click individual groups and choose Exclude from Tagging. You can also check File > Database Properties > … > Exclude Groups from tagging to disable it for a database.
Some of my folders are completely empty after I deleted the tags. I see many files whose names end with the word ‘copy,’ but they are not indicated as duplicates or replicants. Since this is too messy, I need to restore the databases from two days ago. I rarely do manual backups (Tools> Backup and Optimize), but I use TimeMachine.
How can I restore the previous version of my databases from TimeMachine?
This is not a file / database backup. It is an internal metadata backup. (See: blog.devontechnologies.com/2017/ … a-backups/)
This is Apple’s TechNote on it: support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250