Devonthink as Finder or bust

Effectively, yes, in that you now have the files in two place. They are, however, completely independent of one another.

When I attempt to export a DB, File>Export is grayed out.
File> Database Archive is my only option. Is the Database Archive the most recent version of the files in the database?

If you simply highlight the complete contents of the database then you can use the Export/Files & Folders entry in the menu, and all will be exported.

god love you for your kindness blanc

Each DB has groups and sub-groups. It doesn’t look like I can select all the files in a DB in one pass, but rather sub group by sub group.

Is there a way to see and select all documents in the DB that I’m missing?

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I think you were answering my question as I typed it
Let me give that a go…

Give it a go :slight_smile: If you select the database from the sidebar and display its contents as a list in the list view (the middle part of the main window), then you can select all entries using the usual macOS method of highlighting the first entry, holding the shift key and highlighting the last entry. The select Export/Files & Folders and I think you should be happily on your way :slight_smile:

Export is on page 133 of the DEVONthink Manual, and there is a whole chapter in the “Take Control” book called “Get Information Out of DEVONthink”. Hope that helps.

Indeed, that does it, many thanks.
I think I was a kid given a microscope who couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t see the moon.
You’ve been very gracious with your time, many thanks

@rmschne
@Blanc

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yes it is, in all glory and detail; I’m at a loss to explain how I missed that after searching both for “export” and for “Files and Folders” in the manual, and should probably go back to bed :crazy_face: @BLUEFROG just ignore me, please :smiley:

You are really most welcome :slight_smile:

Help > Documentation > Menus > The File Menu > Import & Export: Export

Welcome @stpls

When I was 10, I took a picture of the moon and made sure to use a flash… you know, because it was dark out :roll_eyes: :stuck_out_tongue:

@rmschne is spot on and it’s been said many times before. DEVONthink is not a Finder nor a Spotlight replacement. I’d suggest digging into the Help > Documentation > Getting Started chapter to get the basics down.

It’s for the benefit of the passers-by as well :wink: :slight_smile:

It’s fine, I’m happy for them to know I’m dumb as a stick, too :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Or just select the top level group
I have two top level groups in the database; Tags and Filing
I can just select the Filing record for export

To me that makes sense: the “Tags” folder does not contain anything which could usefully be exported (on second thoughts, I suppose each tag could be exported as a folder which contained shortcuts to the actual (tagged) files; that would be a similar request to this one).

As a newcomer, I would also like to recommend you the power of DT. I think the index model is perfect for you, it keeps the finder and DT with the same file structure and it works perfectly with other app like Obsidian

Here I would like to share my personal usage and hope to discuss with you~ I name folders with tasks and use task folders to manage all files~ I use tags to manage the status of tasks, task delegates, task execution scenarios, and set smartgroup to filter out different tasks~ so you can get a similar experience to Omnifocus ~ (The advantage is that it can accommodate various types of attachments. The disadvantage is that the operation is a bit complicated and the functionality is a bit rudimentary)

Task folders can be nested inside task folders, and can also hold files. If a file is what I want to collect, I will put that file into a folder and tag the folder with tags to indicate the status, type, and creator of that file. since each file I want to collect is managed by a parent folder, files that are related to each other can be associated together by way of replicate~ so you will get a dual-link experience in the form of folders (The advantage is that any format can be linked, not just markdown notes, and the link is stable and not easily broken, so you can modify a file and update it globally. The disadvantage is that the operation is a bit complicated and the connection is not intuitive)

Based on the above description you must have seen that one set of tags is used to describe the task, and one set is used to describe the file, in order to distinguish them, I have numbered them, starting with T, and starting with F. Also, I use colored labels to describe the status of all tasks, so that the distinction between tasks and files becomes clear.

I refer to the usage of other users in the community to inherit the information of the files when generating the parent folder, most importantly the thumbnails, so that the parent folder of image type files can also display the internal images.

With this management model, creating notes to any file becomes an easy task. When I am reading papers, I generate a parent folder for the paper and then just add notes in its own folder.

The reason why I came up with such a management approach is that I really don’t like to have files in different app, and if a project uses more than one app, this task-centric approach will show its advantages~

I hope my grammatically incorrect sharing can bring you help!

when I am using other apps - say Microsoft Word - when I make the default auto save folder the Inbox, I get dozens of iterations saved in the Inbox. How can I avoid this?

This is tricky because from Word’s point of view, the file saved to the Inbox folder disappears as DEVONthink processes the file and moves to the Global Inbox. So each time Word saves, it looks like an empty directory.

What I do is save to the Inbox like you did, but then immediately exit that application. I then switch to DEVONthink and open the file from the Inbox. At this point, the application will save within the DEVONthink database. You might get orphan files in the database if the application creates other files in that location that DEVONthink is not aware of.

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I’d enjoy discussing task management workflows, but I think it’s off topic for this discussion
I’ll participate if you post a new discussion topic