I’m a new user. I had been a paperless user and had imported roughly 4300 records to Devonthink4, renaming them and entering in custom metadata . When I opened DEVONthink tonight it said something about correcting errors and did I want to repair them? I did that and the database was successfully repaired. Now the total number of records has at least doubled. The majority of the new records appear to have the original paperless names such as EAEDFE07-55B7-4114-AC50-6 - 2025-06-23 instead of 2025-06-03 - Receipt - Intuit. The Metadata on these new records is blank or undefined. As for the existing records there appears to be three cases (1) appear to be correct with all the metadata (2) have the correct name but only have the tag and ‘merchant” metadata (3) have the correct name but a “-1” has been appended to the name, some have the tag and merchant fields , others have nothing.
Help! How do I get backto where I was?
Do you remember what kind of error was reported? Are these new records located in the group Orphans? If that’s the case - are some or all of them duplicates?
Here is a screenshot. I think I know what happened. Inadvertently, the database file ended up being mirrored to an external hard drive and at some point Devonthink must have assumed that that was the primary copy. Some kind of replication error must have occurred. My choice now is to use a backup copy and lose a lot of work or to try and salvage this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. The correct number of records is somewhere around 2800. Thanks!
And also I don’t remember what kind of error it was. It just asked if I wanted to ignore repair or use a backup copy.
Correction the correct number records should be near 4300, the 2800 number is actually what is in the back up
Are you importing or indexing the documents into your database?
Perhaps 2/3 of the records were imported from Paperless. They would’ve had a UUID name like 679C7C3E-6B6D-45F3-8D58-9 - 2025-11-10-34.pdf. I then created custom metadata fields and I changed the name to a meaningful name following a standard pattern. Then I entered all the data in the Metadata fields. The other one third of the records were imported. I understand that the original files are still located in xxx.dtBase2>Files-noindex>pdf. I was thinking about copying all those records into a recovery folder and then importing that folder into a backup database that was made before I attempted the repair. I did reopen that backup in DEVONthink and the files there are correct. I made sure this time that the restored backup database file was located on the hard drive on my MacBook Pro. I isolated the corrupted version.
I should’ve said the other one third of the records were dragged into the Inbox.
In DEVONthink, hold the Option key and select Help > Report Bug and we’ll look at the logs.
