I’m a biology (and English) teacher, too, and I went (almost) completely paperless a while ago, that is I not only got rid of my space-eating set of huge folders, but I also use an iPad Pro as my only tool during the lesson. There’s usually nothing else on my desk. And that’s where I wasn’t able to use DT.
I love DT and use it as a huge archive for 3 databases, one of them school related. There, I only store recent articles and school stuff that I collect wherever it crosses my path (teachers notoriously being hunters and collectors as the saying goes).
Why not in class? Well, to quickly pull up the lesson plan, the needed worksheets, PPTs and other media, DT is not fast enough in a “live” situation, I think. If your wife wants to use it to STORE and sort it all, it’s perfect. For the lessons, she’ll probably need to get the stuff out of DT again to organise it for the live situation. Among teachers, OneNote indeed is the go-to app. Organise its notebooks, sections and pages for every single lesson, drag in the materials and pull it up quickly just minutes before lessons starts. During the lesson, you can easily re-arrange things, make or add quick notes if something went well enough to do it again next year or if you failed badly and want to warn yourself for next time.
However, I despise OneNote because like so many other apps, it uses a proprietary format for its documents and relies heavily (soon exclusively I’m sure) on OneDrive and a subscription. Whatever I want to get OUT again, I have to EXPORT, I don’t have discrete files to store or copy to / from folders on a server of MY choice. That’s why I use Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks for Mac and iOS (iOS version 10 due in January): notebooksapp.com. Every file stays a file, stored locally, on Dropbox or WebDAV. Notebooks are nested folders, and that’s it. Perfect combination for my paperless workflow: DT stores it, makes it searchable while Notebooks SHOWS it in class.
About scanning: I still do that sometimes with my Epson Workforce scanner/printer, but only if it’s less than 10 pages. For everything else, I use the school’s Xerox. Many schools have those machines that not only copy stuff but can quickly scan huge amounts of pages in no time and create PDFs. DT does the OCR for me later.
Hi guys, so It took a while but now I finally got my scanner and I tried to set it up. It a ads-2800w from brother. What I didn’t managed to do is to scan on the network with ocr. Either I scan on the pc drive, than ocr works or I chose a network drive and then it’s just a plain pdf without any enhancements. I wonder if there is a way to scan on the smb network drive by the favorite buttons with a computer involving step. Since my amd300 is running as a server all day long it would be possible to use it for this. But I don’t know how to automate that process. I even haven’t achieved yet that the scan to the pc drive with ocr is automated. It always opens up the scanned file in the end. Next step would be to setup devonthink. Last night I gave it a brief try. But it’s not selveexplaining, I didn’t achieved anything… Yes yes yes… I know… Read the wonderful manual.
If the SMB folder is stored or mountable on macOS, you can install and use one of the folder action scripts. For example “Import, OCR, Delete”.
See page 189 of the DT 3.0.3 manual. In short:
Control-click a folder in the Finder.
Select Services > Folder Actions Setup from the contextual menu.
From the list of available actions, select the folder action script click Attach.
You can also use a smart rule to perform these steps, but bear in mind you cannot index remote network folders if I understand correctly from the manual. I tried to do that recently, but this resulted in varying behavior in my case.
You can index a mounted network volume, however the performance is limited by the quality of the connection. Especially with WiFi, this could be poor and even subject to random disconnections. Ethernet is also subject to service interruptions but much less so.
OK, then I misunderstood. This is what I picked up from page 48:
You should only index local data, e.g., on
the local hard drive or connected drives.
DEVONthink doesn’t support indexing data
that resides only in the cloud.
I considered connected drives locally connected drives, not network connected drives. Moreover because internet connected drives are explicitly excluded.
I tried to recreate the folder action with a smart rule on indexed folders per your suggestion last week. The rule works, but in my case DT seems to index a network folder only once. I have to add the same network folder again for DT to recognize newly added content.
That behavior was so consistent that I find it unlikely it could be explained by a poor WiFi signal, but I am not sure whether that connection uses a 5GHz signal though, I’ll check.
Either way, I’m busy setting up Hazel to transfer files to the macOS drive and retry your smart rule suggestion from there. It does add dependency on other software though.
I would consider a “connected” drive as one that is connected directly to my hardware bus or directly to an external port or directly via ethernet or directly in a local ethernet or WiFi domain.
Clouds do not have this distinction, figuratively and (AFAIK also) literally. IOW, clouds can be “discovered” in the OS to be clouds rather than to be any of the above cases (e.g. traffic has to pass through a proxy server or intermediary DNS server in the case of a cloud).
This may be a concern due to the way that you make/unmake the network connection to the external drive. Have you assigned a hard IP address to the networked drive for example? Do you have it set to automatically mount. Do you have it mount and “touched” BEFORE you open DevonThink to restart the indexing?
Somewhere must be a network guru who might help you figure out this one.
Clouds do not have this distinction, figuratively and (AFAIK also) literally. IOW, clouds can be “discovered” in the OS to be clouds rather than to be any of the above cases
Thanks for your response. Do you or anybody else happen to use indexing of network folders without problems? If so, it is indeed likely the behavior I observe is due to my local setup.
With regard to cloud storage: from a network perspective I don’t think there is that much of a difference between traffic to and from a network folder going through a local router, switch or crossover cable, than through your ISP’s router to a remote folder on the internet other than additional latency through any of these routes due to hardware and protocols as you mentioned.
As I understand from @BLUEFROG’s answer, it’s latency in particular that can cause undesired behavior.
Have you assigned a hard IP address (…) the indexing?
Yes, it’s a static route to an IP, the drive is quick in response without problems and mounts without troubles in macOS.
I could try an ethernet connection over a switch to troubleshoot any latency. But that requires a whole bunch of rewiring, so I’ll try my Hazel approach first
If there is one thing in life I learned, it is that calling yourself an expert in anything is pretty tricky (thank you David Dunning and Justin Kruger).
That said, I am quite confident that my knowledge about network engineering is at a more than average level
So to summarize. It’s not recommended to collect the scans on an nas drive due to latency or whatever problems. That would mean I would need to store all the data on the MacBook of my wive, which is not a storage monster and already overcrowded with her other data. I would also need to reconfigure the scanner to directly. Scan to the macbook which would mean it would have to be running all day long. Or I would need some kind of a copy job from the nas to 5he macbook. Correct? seems not like an easy to setup robust process. And not wife friendly.
Sorry for any confusion, but as @BLUEFROG mentioned indexing of network folders apparently is supported, but might be troublesome over an unstable WiFi connection.
I presume many people use a NAS to store DT items, so please don’t confuse my trouble with a working solution on your side.
I use folder actions on a network folder as mentioned, and that works great. But every time I reboot macOS I have to restart them for network folders. That is somewhat bothersome, but not impossible.
That is why I want try and use Hazel to copy the content to a local storage and have smart ruled go from there.
Indexing data on an NAS is possible, but as mentioned you do have to be aware of the potential effects of the network connection.
For support purposes, I have a folder indexed from a Synology NAS on my network. Changes made in the Finder, in the Synology web interface, and DEVONthink all correlate. However, there can be a perceptible lag (not extraordinary, but perceptible) when accessing those resources on my network.
Also, if you are syncing to a machine without access to the same NAS, you will end up with a pending file, like so…
Thanks! So a general question. If I choose to buy devonthink and want to use it also on my own mac ( that I don´t bought yet) and therefore access the database from two different computers: will I need to buy two licences for that setup? And can I synchronize the DB somehow, or how do you approach that question? And for that I would definitely need to store the data on a network drive?
I should have better said, a person who has more knowledge than I do about networking.
I will note that some time ago when I was running a Synology drive I found that I had to do the equivalent of viewing a folder on the mounted drive in order to get the drive to be recognized for any file search operations.
No,you wouldn’t need to purchase another license. A DEVONthink 3 purchase includes two seats - two per-machine licenses, so this would cover installation on both machines.
Sync is covered in Help > Documentation > In & Out > Sync .
And for that I would definitely need to store the data on a network drive?
I am not sure what data you’re referring to. If you’re using a WebDAV-enabled NAS, the sync data would be on the networked drive. If you’re referring to data in the database, the answer would relate to if you’re indexing data in the databases (and see my previous comment about the potential pitfall).
Maybe I just don’t understand how to use the tool. Let’s say my wife and me want to use the same collection/database. So that I can add content that she is seeing on her Mac and vice versa. Let’s assume I do have a qnap 453mini nas. How would I need to setup devonthink for that. Is it possible? Thanks.
The first thing to do is separate the machines in your mind.
You are not accessing one central database. You are accessing local copies of the same database on each machine (and this is the decentralized data model we advocate).
I can’t comment on the capabilities of that NAS.
This is a link from QNAP’s support site, but I don’t know if it pertains to that model…
If it is WebDAV-capable, then you should be able to set up a WebDAV sync location in DEVONthink’s Preferences > Sync(and it should appear as a device on your local network in the preferences too).
Thanks. But I still don’t understand the procedure. So the sync is just another Copy of the files that are located on the hdd? And with that I can sync multiple devices?
Technically speaking, no - sync is not just another ”copy of the files.
Practically, they function that way for the purpose of sync.
And yes, that WebDAV sync location can be used with multiple devices running DEVONthink or DEVONthink To Go.
Thanks. I’m still trying to understand the tool. Unfortunately I don’t have too much time for it right now. Can you please tell me… What would be the best way to get the data into devonthink. I scan to a drive on my nas that is mapped to the Mac of my wife. The PDFs are in various subfolders by a coarse sorting like biology. German, Latin and stuff like that. Is it now possible to transfer new files in these folders automated to an biology inbox in the biology database, from. Where I somehow can subsort them? I still want to keep the files in the folder as a backup. Would a. Smart rule be a solution? I tried with folder actions but that didn’t work quite well.
Is there a way to automatically search the documents for a header and put that info into the file name.
Thanks.
OH and one more thing. Was the price of the software raised? To get it to Germany would cost 218euros. Is that the regular price?
If there is a parent folder which contains all of the child and grandchild subfolders, then all you need to do is to Import the parent folder and all else will follow.
I’m not sure from your reactions whether you already own a NAS or not (if so, sorry I read over it), but here’s heads up with regard to SMB and macOS Catalina.
As I understand Apple dropped support for SMBv1 in macOS Catalina, which might be the protocol your Brother uses to scan to a network folder. If you’re considering buying a NAS, please keep in mind the shared folder on a NAS might need to be approachable by file sharing protocols that both the scanner and macOS use.
seems not like an easy to setup robust process. And not wife friendly.
