First an aside in response to bosie’s question, one advantage of the Mac is that you can easily run MacOS from an external drive. I have a 2011 iMac, with HDD, but to speed it up I have plugged an external SSD into the Thunderbolt port, and it runs a lot faster.
But the main point is to echo the point that DTP can be used in different ways, and that cgruneneberg’s suggestions for searches should yield some useful pointers. I have been using DTP for ages to manage the photos I take of documents in archives. For me the main function was processing photos of single pages into multi-page searchable PDFs and then searching for documents on certain topics (unfortunately, with 50-year old carbon copies, OCR often fails, so manual search is necessary as well). It is excellent for this, and my basic group structure corresponds to the archives (as in National Archive, Harvard University Library, Duke University, …), Collections, Boxes and Folders from which the documents were taken.
I also dump a lot of other stuff into DTP, because it is searchable and I won’t (I hope) lose it. I started with a single database, though when it got too big, I split it, because it was just a pain moving and backing up a file that contained over 100GB of data. This is one advantage of indexing files. I have something like 120GB of documents, but the database indexing the lot, enabling me to search, add keywords, create and group replicants, is under 7GB.
The slow but thorough method for me was to dump stuff I am going to use from DTP into a bibliographic database, first Sente, until support for that ended, and then Bookends. I say slow, because if the documents are “home-made” from photos, bibliographic data has to be typed in for each one, and that is a slow process even with software such as Textexpander to provide shortcuts. So my workflow was DTP then Bookends and then into Scrivener (very highly recommended for the final writing). Now I am trying to identify more relevant stuff in DTP being more selective in what I drop into Bookends.
Another problem was the note-taking. I have done some in Bookends, and I created dozens of Groups in Bookends, though was not finding that perfect. So I began to explore other options, such as linking all my Bookends references back to DTP, so I could use DTP to sort stuff into groups, and create notes that would be the basis for writing. Avigail Oren and a colleague have developed a workflow that looks very interesting if you make much use of archival material (her target is historians, and you should find it via the searches cgrunenberg mentioned), and had I been starting from scratch I would probably have adopted it, but I decided that jumping to it mid-stream, when I already have around 28k refs in Bookends, and 70k docs in DTP, does not make sense.
Instead, I decided to add Tinderbox to the mix, and to try using that to organize materials and notes. The key is dragging references from Bookends into Tinderbox, where I can create a visual map of how documents link together, along with other notes I create. It seems to be working with the one topic I have tried it on, though I have yet to find out whether it will continue to work as I venture into other topics and try to create a map with far more complex interlocking networks of connections linking the various topics within my project.
So there are reasons for holding data in three apps, because they all do different things well, and for me the key is being able to go easily between a document stored in DTP, Bookends and Tinderbox. I do a search in DTP, find stuff that I either locate in Bookends or add to Bookends, from where it gets put into the network in Tinderbox. A bit chaotic, but as I have said, it proved harder than I thought to switch to a more rational system, making better use of DTP’s capabilities, mid-project. Hence my interest in picking up ideas from this thread.
