I have been happy to try DT in demo for a few days. Added 20-30 .rtf notes, a folder of pdfs, began writing a journal.
Then I transferred my whole User directory to a new Powerbook. On booting DT, I got this message : "Database already open"…
Nothing appears in browser but, quite curiously, the Concordance tool shows statistics corresponding to what I had.
I checked user privileges, as usually when changing MacOSX computers. Unsuccessfully…
Then I turned back to my old machine — just to see that the original database on the original computer does not appear anymore! The files and backups are there, there are no warnings… but no browser entries neither!
This is a frightening behaviour for a program supposed to work as a "perfect secretary".
This means that either
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you’ve copied the database folder while DT was running. Then the copied files might not be valid (e.g. if you’ve copied while DT was writing contents to disk etc.)
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DT crashed and afterwards you’ve copied the database (in that case just delete the DEVONthink.lock file inside the database folder and start DT again, there will be an improved handling for this in v1.7)