(This is with DEVONthink 3.9.6 on macOS 13.6.4 and DEVONthink To Go 3.8.1 on iPad.) I have a situation where attempting to empty the trash produces the (familiar) dialog
Now, I know what this means (well, usually, anyway …), but I did not expect it to happen this time.
To understand which indexed items might be causing this warning, I first clicked the “remove imported items” to empty the trash of those, then restarted DEVONthink, then looked into the trash again. There are two items in my trash right now, a group and a tag, and each have items underneath them. For the purposes of this question, let’s focus on the group only.
This particular group in the trash was a normal group in one of my databases (i.e., it is not itself an indexed or replicated group), but it contained only replicants of items that are in one large hierarchical folder. I need to emphasize that I was extremely careful to only put replicants in that group, never to move files from indexed subfolders.
Looking in the trash, the contents look like this:
I have turned on the preference setting for “Mark duplicates and replicants in color”, and as you can see, none of them are shown in color, indicating that none are considered replicants. If I select one of the files in this group, open the Generic Inspector, and look at the “Instances” pull-down, it shows this:
If I click the pull-down, here is an example of what I see:
My first point of confusion is the following. In other situations (not involving the trash), the pattern shown above in the pull-down is what one sees when an item is replicated. However, the label on “Instances” says 0 replicants, and the color-coding of the name also implies the item in the trash is not a replicant. So, what is happening here? Is the trash being treated differently for the purposes of counting replicants and showing the Enclosing Groups?
My second point of confusion is this: what will happen if I empty the trash again and pick “Remove All Items” from the dialog? Will the files be deleted from their locations on disk?
If the answer to the last question is “yes”, then I will have more follow-up questions.
