DEVONthink eating up a lot of disk storage

DEVONthink
1

Running DEVONthink on my macmini server that is a bit sparse on storage. No problem usually because I just move everything that’s big onto my external SSD.

However, the sync implementation still eats up most of my disk space without me being able to do anything. At the time of writing:

  • Library/Mobile Documents/sync/DEVONthink - 34gb
  • Application Support/DEVONthink 3/Cloudy - 20gb

The databases themselves have a total size of 30gb and are not on my main harddrive but external SSD.

What can I do to fix this? My Macmini has only 120gb and DEVONthink alone is making it very hard to do much else with that internal storage.

2

One possibility is to use another sync location that doesn’t require a local mirror like iCloud.

3
  • Application Support/DEVONthink 3/Cloudy - 20gb

This shouldn’t remain in this state as DEVONthink purges data here after syncing.
What directory has the largest space consumed?

4

When is it purging this? It’s been this size for a while and all the syncs look like they finished. I restarted DEVONthink, verified the sync locations through the sync settings preference and emptied the caches.

5
  • Did you do a thorough verification?
  • And again, what directory is the largest?
6

I used “Verify Location Quickly” and “Verify & Repair Database”. I didn’t rebuild the database yet

The directory that is the largest is a random hash-named folder of one of my databases. There isn’t much information I can pull from it (or it’s contents)

7

The directory that is the largest is a random hash-named folder of one of my databases.

But in what parent folder in the Cloudy directory?

8

The parent folder inside Cloudy/ is just the name of one of my databases, inside that, hash-named folders.

Anything you reckon I should try? If I could just move this folder onto my external SSD I would care much less about it’s size and what it does.

9

I think I figured out it. DEVONthinks sync ate up all my disk storage and because my system is now out of storage, DT can’t finish the sync so the Cloudy folder stays big.

I symlinked Application Support/DEVONthink to my external SSD and DEVONthink seems to be happy with it, it started syncing the rest of the database.

It’d be nice if DT could use the Database location out of the box as sync folder as well to avoid this problem on very big databases.