Hello.
I use DTP as a file previewer mostly. All of my folders and files are indexed, rather thn imported. However, the dtbase file is over 850mg. Does this make sense?
Thanks.
I assume you mean the database requires 850 MB storage space. That isn’t the best way to analyze the size of a database as to speed and responsiveness.
The most important measurements of databases are the total number of documents and the total number of words. Those measurements are found in File > Database Properties.
When you Index-capture a file, DEVONthink reads and indexes the text content of the file and maintains metadata including the Name, the group location, any tags you may assign, etc.
Each database maintains a Concordance (Tools > Concordance). DEVONthink ‘knows’ the words contained in each document. Moreover, it analyzes the contextual relationships of the words in every document and can compare the contextual relationships of a document you are reading to those in every other document, so that See Also can suggest others that may have similarities to the one you are reading. (That’s mind-boggling; the human brain isn’t wired to do that, which is why I consider DT to the be best research assistant I’ve ever had.)
By default, a database also contains 3 internal backup folders that contain earlier states of the database, so that if the database becomes damaged one can restore it to an earlier state. (But that’s not a complete backup strategy, as if your disk were to crash, you would still lose the database. We recommend backups to an external medium as well. I use Time Machine plus the File > Database Archive that’s available in DT Pro and Office.
Although file viewing is convenient in DEVONthink, as it allows one to view a number of file types without having to jump about in different applications, it can be far more powerful and useful than that.
DT Pro and DT Pro office allow multiple open databases. I’ve got a number of topical databases that contain data that’s interesting and/or useful to me. My main database holds a set of references and notes (more than 30,000) that I use for research and writing. Another database that’s usually open contains financial information - banking transactions, investment transactions, tax-related files, etc. Others hold selected correspondence, projects completed or planned for my log cabin, etc. Altogether I manage more that 250,000 documents among a number of databases (some of which I rarely if ever open, but might be critical one of these days).
Okay then, thanks for the explanation.