Completely stuck trying to sync my database

I have been a DEVONthink user since 2009. At some point since then, I got another laptop and started to sync using DropBox. Then, I started using DTTG and started syncing that. Then, when I closed my DropBox account I switched to using iCloud (CloudKit) for syncing. I set it up using a secure key. By this point I no longer had the first laptop. After a while I discovered that DEVONthink on my laptop was not in sync with DTTG on my phone and I had added documents on both in the mean time, so from that point on I started just using DTTG. I stopped using it in 2020, but now I would like to try out DEVONthink 4 on another new laptop. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the secure key that I used and when I tried to add CloudKit as a sync location on the new laptop it behaved as if I was setting up a whole new location. Sync was still working on DTTG so I tried removing the secure key on there so that I could access it from my new laptop without a key. It told me that it would be best to “clean the location” so I agreed for it to do that. I am now still not able to access it from the new laptop and I can’t download any files to DTTG, so it seems as if “clean the location” meant “delete the database”, but I am still not sure. I still have the other database on my old laptop, so I can rescue at least some of my documents if this is the case. Is this my best option, or is the database that I was using with DTTG still actually available somewhere?

I’m pretty sure that I could get the secure key with a few tries, but I can’t see how I would know if I had guessed the right one.

Anyway, hopefully somebody can help me before I destroy all of my data.

Thanks!

If you cleaned the sync data it is gone. However, your sync data is not your database. But it also appears you were using a shallow sync in DEVONthink To Go so logically you can’t download the contents from the sync location since you cleaned it.

Based on what you said, the database on the old laptop would be the only copy available to you.