I increasingly set up work folders on projects in DevonThink. This means I usually have a set of live documents that are evolving.
Has anyone developed an automated way to do version tracking of live documents in DevonThink? I can manually do this, but it would be nice to do this in an automated way in DevonThink or by indexing a folder with DevonThink where the automated process occurs.
The main files would be word and excel, but occasionally markdown.
Using Smart Rules, see Version Folders - #2 by Blanc
fwiw My backup process (Arq Premium) is hourly incremental
I can recover previous document versions
No DEVONthink will not generate live versions. However, see the built-in Create Version and Remove Obsolete Versions smart rules.
I have Time Machine running but was looking for something that would create a version copy at the time of saving new changes and edits.
I think it might be possible to set up a MS One Drive directory and index it with DT. When you use MS Word in conjunction with One Drive, the versioning feature becomes active. It might also be possible to use git in a similar fashion.
I don’t want to over complicate this, so for now I will set up a couple of smart rules. I will keep looking into this as versioning is becoming an increasingly important part of my archival strategy.
You could create a Git repository and index that with DT. But that’s probably overkill. And: Excel and Word (your “main files”) are ZIP archives nowadays that don’t lend themselves easily to a display of differences. If that’s what you’re after.
Probably a better option for MS documents.
I’ve had the same problem for years. In my humble opinion, the lack of versioning is DevonThink’s biggest failing. As a long-term DT and DTTG user, I have entrusted most of my records to DT. I use Time Machine to back up the data, and I also perform a periodic dump of all databases which stored in multiple locations. But this is huge because every file has to be duplicated in each dump.
If DT came out with a paid upgrade (version 4?) which included versioning and verifiable consistency checking, like git, I’d probably run for my wallet to purchase the upgrade. Ideally it would be capable of building a full version history by stepping through years of Time Machine backups.
However, with several thousand critical files, I constantly fear losing something due to a system crash or a sync error from the bad old days of sync.
I would have liked to use git to checkpoint the databases on a daily basis because git guarantees that the checked files are complete and correct. It would allow me to go back to any arbitrary date and look at the database.
But alas, we have always been told that git is incompatible with DT. I have yet to find any other way to safely store all changes in a manner that can be interrogated (unlike backups), ensuring that no files are deleted or lost.
Perhaps, but there is a large number of products on the market that already do this, particularly for enterprise document management systems some of which are “open source” and available for “free” (last I looked). And of course some of the consumer “cloud” storage systems have versioning. While DEVONthink could enter this market should they chose (requiring capital and introducing business risk, of course), there is nothing stoping you using these other systems now?
You mentioned your data is backed up using TimeMachine
In addition, I also use cloud backup storage with Arq premium
This provides me with no “fear of losing something”
There are many documents for which versioning does not make sense
If I needed that, I’d go for GitHub and similar services.