FoxTrot Indexing Strategies

DEVONthink Tips
1

For those FoxTrot fans, you might want to think about your indexing strategy under 2.0 since you now have the option of indexing not only the DT metadata but the actual files as well. As I see it, there are three choices:

  1. Index just the metadata

The advantage here is that when you want to open an item, it will open directly in DT with all the advantages (or disadvantages) of that. One of the problems is that the viewer for DT metadata files kinda sucks so you end viewing an html page in FT, for example, as a mass of unformatted words pretty much forcing you to open the item.

  1. Index just the files

The advantage of this is that you can see the actual files with native viewers. The problem is that you can’t access the metadata so if you want the url for the page, for example, you have to go and find the DT item in addition.

  1. Index both

Best of both worlds but obviously you get two of everything (hate that)

For me, I decided to just index the files so I can see things properly in the FT viewer. If I need to go further and access the metadata for the item, I can do a search in Spotlight and bring up the DT file.

Might not be the answer for everybody but it works for me.

2

This folder, right?
~/Lib/Caches/Metadata/DEVONthink Pro 2

To do this would I have to dig into each database’s package contents and add the Files.noindex folder?

3

Yes

I just added the folder where I keep my DT database2 files and it indexed them fine…no need to go further.

An additional benefit of indexing only the databases is that the file types show up correctly in the FT file categories when searching instead of a mass of files in the “Other” category.

4

Lol…I went back to FT indexing the metadata only. I ended up not liking all the RTF files in the Word Processing category but also realized that I wanted to keep my DT data separate from my other files for reasons that are probably not interesting to anybody but me.

As it stands, by indexing only the metadata, my “Other Files” category contains almost all DT stuff so I can look at it or not depending on my needs. I set FT to open the files on Enter to it is pretty fast and anyway, if I need a real search of my DT stuff, its better to do that inside DT as I then can export the stuff to another database.

It just shows the complications of having to use a separate program to do what the OS should be doing:

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