DB manipulation, goups / tags, compare, restore DB - HowTo?

The never ending learning curve… :laughing:

Ok, here’s what happened:
I have a DB that contains a group named “TABS”
As I am an incurable multi mega tab / window browser-person, I often end up slowing down my quad core cpu to a near halt by too many tabs.
In previous ages I used Firefox + Chrome + add-ons to keep tabs under control.
In more recent ages I more and more forced myself to switch to Safari - not because I like it so much, but because it warrants the best compatibility towards interaction with other software & utilities.

Back to DTPO:
I use Veritrope’s Alfred workflow to save Safari tabs to DTPO.
I’ve made it a habit to end or start the day by closing down too many tabs & windows and store these into the “TABS” group.

So I have over 600 items in this group, together with somewhere between 10 - 20 nested sub-groups.

What happened?
Testing Evernote interaction, I created a new Evernote DB, and started to import from my preferred EV notebook. (I use EV most to capture all kinds of stuff as it is really cross platform.)
As this notebook is rather large this took the better part of the night to finalize…

In the mean time, I continued to work on my macbook.
But I had also screensharing open to check on my Mac mini doing the EV import.
So I saw the EV icon happily jumping up and down and let it do its work.

The next day I found that my “TABS” group had gone missing…
Most probably this happened during the screen sharing session, and because of the lag and slowing down mac mini.
Any way -

Off course I found my “TABS” group in the trash.
Since this is only a group / tag, it only holds nothing… as all the contents are still in the DB. (correct me if I’m wrong)

So here I am confronted with the finder look alikeness of DTPO, but the intrinsically different underpinnings. No critic intended, just a reminder a user really needs to understand this.

To the rescue:
Luckily I realised that my macbook was still closed.
I keep all DTPO instances synced to a syncstore.
So what I did is close wifi and network connection, open DTPO, disable sync of the relevant DB and started to compare.

This of course made me re-read Bill DeVilles topic about 11 Stupid Backup Strategies…

Now my question:

  1. What is the best approach to restore a hierarchical group / tag structure in case of loss like this?

  2. I realize that you have two distinct matters, being the items contained in a DB and the group / tags structure that you are overlaying. Is there any method to separately make a back up of these two?
    ( Is this what is meant in the preferences? > Backup tab:
    Backups contain only the metadata storage and search index. Use Time Machine to backup complete databases including internal and external files.)

  3. Are tools or methods available to restore a DB backup to another computer? (across network or using other media)

  4. Using advanced search I tried to create a search that would match “Date Modified” to a specific date. This was not possible. Can this possibly be included in future updates?Picture.png
    While it seems to be possible here:
    Picture.png

Looking forward to learn a whole lot more… :wink:

You are the “big data” champion :open_mouth:

Always remember that the contents of tags are replicants (or they should be – if you are storing documents directly into tags you’ll end up with a mess eventually). So, because there is a certain fragility with replicants – they only exist within a single database – your best disaster recovery strategy is to (a) close and move the bad database to a new location or drive; (b) recover a copy of the entire database from wherever you do back up or from a sync store.

Backup is storing metadata about the individual files. It is not for recovering lost groups. The best strategy is good and frequent full backups of your databases.

Yes - DEVONthink Sync.

Something like this works:

Edit: I used “Date Added” instead of “Date Modified” – but the logic is the same.