DevonThink - a lifesaver!

Want to share a tips I had a great use of some days ago. Had some problems with my Mac and OSX Yosemite. Was most likely some corrupted files so some things did not work properly and I simply could not start my mac.

I use FileVault so no recovery partition on my SSD.

Tried with Apples excellent support and came to the conclusion that to reformat the SSD and do a clean install would not hurt. Did a backup and a clean install and decided to get El Capitan since all was fresh and I was going to download the apps I have bought from each developer anyhow.

Did the big mistake of not knowing that El Capitan could not recover all my info from my Yosemite SparseImage on my TimeMachine.

Tried with Apples Support but they do not and should not support betas. I tried to reinstall Yosemite as well but my hard drive did not accept it to be formatted in the “old” format. I am far from an expert so just thought it was fine since - I have almost all of my info inside DevonThink and the rest of my non critical/non confidential info is iCloud anyhow including music in iTunes Match.

All went fine until I came to Messages/iChat/iMessages. I thought that app was a part of iCloud but not. So since I did a clean install I lost old chats since there is no simple way to import them when you do a clean install. Since the library etc. are hidden it took me some time to figure out how to reach them on my old TimeMachine.

To the point - lately I just tested to create a New Group in DevonThink and dragged over all my messages unorganized from my backup to see how that worked.

That worked perfect and now all Messages/SMS are saved and easily searchable as well!

So I rely more on my DevonThink than on the TimeMachine for the future!

As a precaution once a month or so I do a encrypted duplicate of my entire DevonThink database and drag it over to my iCloud. Most of the time I do not want sensitive information to be in a cloud for daily use just a password away but as a “bank safe” it works fine.

So from now on, I will for sure “back-up” all my Messages to DevonThink from time to time. Know Korm does not like DevonThink to be a substitution for finder but for me it works great.

Forgot, to sync my iOS units worked flawless after my clean install. Hope the Dev-team don´t stress the new version of DTTG. Better that it is stabile and works. Could not be happier with a system. Just works. Sometimes I have a feeling DevonThink is more reliable and easier to understand than Apples own systems and apps.

Huh interesting. I didn’ t know you could import messages from iMessage.

In fact, I don’t know how :slight_smile: So I have two questions for you…

  1. How do you import a message from iMessage?
  2. How do you get new messages from iMessage? Say I’ve just imported the last week’s worth of messages, and now new ones come in… I want to import only those ones.
  1. In Finder, click Option - go - library - messages - archive. You will find a list of folders dated from today and backwards. Drag them in to DT. There is also a attachment folder with just that…

  2. Complicated - do a search on internet.

Hrm… no archive folder. Just an attachments folder, and 3 files: chat.db, chat.db-shm, chat.db-wal

The Messages folder location changes depending on the OS X release. In Yosemite, only the database is viewable.

I’m on 10.9. Is there a way to import messages into DTPO?

Choose a conversation in messages. Select some or all message. Copy them. Paste into a document in DEVONthink. Or, print the conversation and save as a PDF to DEVONthink.

It really stinks that Apple changed this as it used to be all nice and neat dated folders with each iChat separated. The SQL approach makes sense from an Apple sync standpoint but I still don’t care for the change myself. Just IMO.

ah cool, thanks