Duplicates - is there a way to "tighten" the rules so that documents are identical, not just similar?

DEVONthink
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1

The title says it all, I think.

I narrowly avoided a disaster after importing 23,000 notes from Evernote. I trusted the word “duplicate” to mean exactly that.

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Welcome @Sans-Culottes

Duplicates have been discussed many times in the forums. It’s also discussed in the Help and manual.

Enable Preferences > General > Stricter recognition of duplicates which considers file size and file type as well.

3

@BLUEFROG Good morning, thanks for the rapid response.

Prior to, and since purchasing I have had a good trawl through the forum and the manual, but sort of felt I might be missing something, hence the question

I have that option checked, yet the apparent duplicates include items are are different in some way. Is there any way of setting the criteria for a duplicate to mean “identical in all aspects other than the date added to DT”? That would weed out “real” duplicates.

Cheers

4

What’s actually different? If this option is checked, then the file size, the file type and the indexed text are identical.

1 Like
5

Hi.

Digging deeper I think I have worked out what the issue is. It’s most probably my issue not DT’s.

I used to send documents and emails to Evernote. Sometimes I would email the same attachment to different people in separate emails , possibly at different times and dates. Also I might file a document in EN with the addition of some text to the EN note, that had the effect of making it unique, I might later send that note to someone by email. As I understand it in EN each email header and text is stored with the attachment as a note.

On importing to DT the EN note is split into its constituent parts and filed in a group in DT. This means the EN notes , which were unique, are now several items in DT, with any attached files being detached from the emails and/or any notes, and therefore creating multiple copies of documents that then quite correctly appear as duplicates in DT.

Does that seem to be a logical explanation? If So I will tweak the smart duplicate rule to ignore all items that were involved in my initial import.

Cheers

6

Yes, that makes sense.

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Thanks. I’m starting to understand some of the basics. :grinning: