Hi Michael
Thank you for taking the time. I get that this all seems pretty incomprehensible to you, and if you don’t have the mental bandwidth, that’s totally fine. I won’t force you! But I think I can quickly dispel your confusion
While the screenshots are not really what I was looking for, the two you included in the PDF and your extra description does give me a clearer picture of what is going on—and what you don’t understand. I was hoping you would show the duplicates. But you couldn’t recreate the situation, that’s okay. It would be good to show the full application window next time, though. At least the full sidebar to the left.
First: It seems you have never created a database! Do you see the section: “Open Databases” in the Sidebar? It looks like there is nothing there.
Instead you seem to think DEVONthink itself is the database, or that there is just “the database”. This fundamental misunderstanding leads to a lot of confusion. With DEVONthink, you can create one or many databases for different purposes.
I was a bit confused when you wrote “all mailboxes and tags in duplicate”. Because DEVONthink can also import email mailboxes But you must be referring to this icon:
That icon means “Inbox”. (It has nothing to do with mail.)
This icon means “Database”:
An inbox is not a database. Each database has its own inbox, which is a Group (think of it as a Folder for now, to not complicate things more) intended as a temporary place to store files/documents before you sort them further. Well, an inbox.
There is one exception: the “Global Inbox”, which is what you are confused about here. This is technically a database, but it is a special database created by DEVONthink to use for incoming files. Since you never created a database, it is all you see. You are supposed to create one or more “real” databases yourself! You then either import files directly to a proper database (in its own inbox or a more specific group), or you store them in the Global Inbox while you decide where they fit.
The Global Inbox is necessary for DEVONthink to work, and you cannot close it (explained later) or delete it. And you should not move it. Instead, create another database and put your files there.
The duplicates and triplicates makes sense now: You can’t close the Global Inbox. But you copied the Global Inbox and opened an identical copy of it (or two).
Each database also has its own list of tags—because you probably want to use different tags in different databases. So the tags were “duplicated” as well, when you opened a copy of your Global Inbox.
I hope that clears up the mystery!
You create a database either from the Menu bar by choosing File > New Database, or from the list of options when you click the little plus icon in the lower left corner of the Sidebar. I suggest you put your database(s) in ~/Databases
— that is, a “Databases” folder in your “Home” directory. (Not in Dropbox – I will get to that in a moment.) After you create it, it should automatically open and be listed in your “Open Databases”. You can start with just one database while you learn the program. Or you can make a “Work” database and a “Home” database. Or whatever makes sense to you, I don’t know what you intend to use DEVONthink for.
This is a snapshot of my sidebar as an example:
You see how I have the “Global Inbox” in the “Globals” section? (1) And then two “Open Databases”: “Feeds” and “Junk Drawer” (2). The currently selected database, marked with *
, is displayed in the section below (3). This section shows the groups in the selected database.
Notice there is an “Inbox” at the top of my selected database! And below that, “Tags”. In DEVONthink’s settings you can choose if you want it displayed like this, under General > Interface > Sidebar . The default is “Unify inboxes” and “Unify tags”. In that case, the inbox and tag list for each database is displayed in the “Globals” section of the sidebar, like this:
This is the default because it makes it easy to access inboxes and tags across all open databases, no matter what database you currently have selected. I personally like to display them more seperate like you see in the previous screenshot. Maybe you would find that less confusing? (The “Globals” section must be where you suddenly saw 2 or 3 “Global Inbox”.)
Below what I have highlighted is the section “Recent Databases” which shows my most recently opened databases. They are all closed, but I can quickly open them again from here. I have collapsed the last two sections, “Smart Groups” and Smart Rules". The sidebar quickly becomes long if you expand everything.
Closing a database
You write:
DT then told me I already had a copy of the DB open. I did not, the old copy as closed.
This looks like another basic misunderstanding. Closing the application window does not closes any database. You can actually have many windows open, all displaying the same database. Quitting DEVONthink does close all databases, since the application is no longer running. But the Global Inbox is always open when DEVONthink is running. So even if you quit the application, you get that message when you try to open a copy of your Global Inbox.
When you want to close a database, you can do that through the Menu bar: File > Close Database > [List of open databases, choose one], or by right-clicking a database in the Open Databases section of the sidebar, and choosing Close Database.
Finally, Dropbox…
You write:
I have a folder called Dropbox on my local hard drive which is backed up to Dropbox. Does that still count as a Dropbox folder?
Yes. And it is not a backup! Dropbox is first and foremost about sync. It started as a way to sync files and folders between two or more machines, and easily share and collaborate on files/folders. Now, Dropbox is a business, so along the way they have added other office-like tools to compete with Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and so. I haven’t followed the details here.
Maybe you think of your Dropbox folder as a backup because it “lives in the cloud”, on their servers. But it is for synchronizing files. If you delete a file in your Dropbox folder by accident, it is gone. How is that a backup? You can choose to “eject” a file to save space on your hard drive and only download it locally when you need it. It just leaves a small alias. But you can still easily delete that, and the same applies—then it is gone everywhere, because it is for synchronizing. It is not a real, proper backup.
But as I briefly mentioned earlier, someone else noted that Dropbox recently launched a dedicated Backup service. I assume you know if you are using it—so that means you are not. If you go to dropbox.com and open their list of products, you will see that “Dropbox” and “Backup” are two separate things. I don’t know the technical details of their backup service.
You should never put your DEVONthink databases in a cloud folder, whether that is Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive or something else. Their server backend doesn’t work like the macOS file system, and it will mess up your database. You can use some of them to sync your databases to other devices, but you don’t do that by placing your database in the cloud folder. DEVONthink has a sophisticated built-in sync function to facilitate this.
I really think everything would seem much easier for you if you read the Getting Started chapter in the manual. It is not that long: 15 pages, including images, with generous line spacing. The language is pretty clear, it is not an overly complicated technical piece of writing.
If you type: x-devonthink://show-help#gettingstarted-simplified
in you browser and press enter, that should take you directly to DEVONthink Simplified in the built-in Help. I don’t like reading more than a few sentences in that window, so I suggest you download it as PDF or Epub, which you can do here. Then you can also highlight, take notes, or mark something if you are not sure what it means and want to ask for clarification in the forum.
If you are not sure what an icon means, there is a list with explanations in Appendix > Iconology (x-devonthink://show-help#appendix-icons
).
Damn. I did not intend to write this much… I tried to be concise, but I wanted to spell things out and not assume much technical knowledge. I hope it helps.