Hello everyone – I enjoy using DevonThink, and one of the major selling points for me is the program’s import/export capability. I now find that I need to export my database for use on a PC, and I have encountered one problem:
Much of my database is in the form of excerpts from long articles or books. I have added these excerpts chronologically, starting at the top of each document. In other words, when I’m reading something I want to take notes on, I copy bits of it as I’m reading through. The result is that if I look at the clips in a given folder in chronological order, they will be in order as far as what page of the document they were from – excerpts from the beginning appear first, excerpts from the end appear last.
This works because of DevonThink’s precise metadata about what time each item was added to the database. But when I export the databae to files and folders, it seems to export things all at once, with the result that the timinng metadata (and hence, effectively, the information about what order the notes in a given folder should be kept in) are lost.
Is there any way to export my database to an open format that will preserve the “time added” metadata?
Ultimately, the aim is to import the whole database into some sort of full-text indexing solution on the PC side, such as Zoot or askSam or dtSearch.
The OS X Finder is capable of displaying items in the order in which they were created or modified.
I haven’t used Windows in several years and don’t remember sorting options there. But if Windows can read the Mac Finder metadata on creation date, you may be OK, as I would hope the Windows programs you mentioned can do such sorts.
There’s a workaround you might consider, assuming that each group contains clippings in a time sequence order that makes sense as “moving through” the pages of a book. You can merge the documents in DT Pro to create a larger document that will hold the clippings in the desired order. You can then export the merged documents, which would consist of the contents of each of your groups.