DT Drawers disappeared (with files)

DEVONthink Tips
1

Yesterday I dropped a bunch of PDFs into my DT-Drawers. They stayed there, as I did not have DT open at the time.

I shut down the machine, then re-started this morning. The DT-Drawers did not appear automatically (the little tab on the left of the screen) as they normally do. When I open DTPro the files I put into the drawers are not there.

  • Any idea what might cause this?
  • How do I manually start up the drawers?
  • Where would those missing files be?

Thanks!

2

Update:

I see DevonThink Sorter running in Activity Monitor.
I don’t see the Sorter drawers at all.
I found all my missing files in the trash (I did not put them there). I’ve put them directly into DT, bypassing the Sorter.

Still worried about what happened, and also interested to know how to get my Sorter to re-appear.

Thanks

3

There are two relevant options in Preferences > Sorter.

Show or Hide the Sorter

Show Sorter at login (this will make Sorter a startup item).

4

Thanks, Bill. I tried that. Here is what I get:

Open DT/Preferences/Show at login: check, close preferences
Open DT/Preferences again: Show at login has unchecked itself

Open DT/Preferences, click: Show - nothing shows up (but Sorter appears in Activity Monitor), Show button toggles to Hide. Click Hide - nothing shows up or disappears, Sorter gone from Activity Monitor.

My System-Pref/Login Items shows DevonThink Sorter listed, with Hide not checked.

Confused, specially since I changed nothing since yesterday or today, and it all seemed fine yesterday.

5

The Sorter doesn’t move files into the Trash other than through user interaction such as you Command-drag files into a Sorter box, or you explicitly drag an item from a Sorter box to the Trash.

As to the fact that it doesn’t show up, that is strange indeed. One thing that comes to mind: are you running a utility that may have some sort of full-screen window and you chose to “Hide” the Sorter when it asked you when it detected such a full-screen window?

The best thing to do would be to first Hide the Sorter and then remove its preferences in your Home > Library > Preferences > com.devon-technologies.think-sorter.plist

6

Thanks Annard. I just did this: hide sorter, remove prefs, re-boot, start DT, show sorter. No luck.

The sorter still appears in Activity Monitor, just not on my screen. And the com.devon-technologies.think-sorter.plist did not get re-generated in my Library/Prefs. I don’t have any full-screen window or app.

On the bright side, I was relieved not to lose my files!

I don’t use the sorter heavily right now (but plan to do so in the future), so for now I can wait to see if installing the next update fixes this.

Btw, I do not like the Sorter “Hide” dialog, would much prefer a series of check-boxes in a preferences pane.

7

I vote for a box to check in preferences that would allow the sorter tab to remain hidden until I mouse to the side of my screen, then have it appear.

8

I would like to receive a crash report that you can find in Home > Library > Logs > CrashReporter, together with anything you can find related to this in the console.log (see Applications > Utilities > Console). Please send this to support@devon-technologies.com. Please add a list of all processes that are running from Activity Monitor.

9

I don’t have any crash-report in the last 10 days, prior to that I have a Skim crash. I have sent you the console.log which seems to show some Devon Sorter issues. I also included the SorterData.plist.

I did find another copy of all my missing files (which I had dragged into the Sorter without completing the import into DTPro, before the Sorter disappeared). They were in ~/Library/App Support/DT Sorter/Default.sorter/some long number, and all seem to have internal DT numbered names. But they are the actual pdf files. The SorterData.plist seems to show this, together with their original file names.

Whatever caused this (DT or otherwise), it was definitely not me doing an accidental delete :slight_smile:

Thanks.

10

Annard: Would it be helpful if Sophie did a complete reboot in Safe mode, then launch the Console and DTP? Those should be the only running applications except for a few others. If this problem still shows up, at least we’ve eliminated interaction with the apps that didn’t launch because of the Safe mode.

One neat troubleshooting tool i’ve recently picked up is called LoginControl and it lets you create a list of login items and then delete all the current login items to remove them from the startup stuff. Once you want to go back to normal, just make your list that you created “active” and then restart again. While not as thorough as the pre-OSX Conflict Catcher, it will help reduce variables.

[Safe mode: Hold down shift key as you’re rebooting.]

-Tod

11

Thanks but her Sorter document got damaged somehow (I can’t imagine how that is possible but I have long ago decided that computers are really non-deterministic and OS X has become more so with each new release).

12

In other words, we don’t know if the cat is dead or alive at this point, do we Herr Schroedinger? If we don’t look in her sorter, everything’s either fine or gone yet if we do look, everything’s gone in this universe.

-Tod

13

FYI. The same thing happened to me - except I didn’t lose any files. One day the sorter was there and then it was gone. It is exhibiting the same behavior as Sophie reported. I really did like the sorter so I’m rather sad about it being gone.

Cindy

14

The Sorter is driving me bats! :imp: I go through periods of time where the damned thing disappears completely and I have to tinker with preference settings, preference files, triple check permissions here there and everywhere, and it’s all quite a hassle. I hope someone figures out what on earth is going on with this thing.

p.s. I second the motion for having the ability to set the Sorter preferences to show/hide the screen-edge tab only when dragging to the screen edge area where the tab resides. :exclamation: