I grabbed a group with my mouse (let’s call it “Taxes 2020”), drug it down to a group in another database and dropped it. the group had many files and one subgroup which also had many files. (dozens or so; pretty sure less than 200 in each).
anyway now I have an empty group in the destination called “Taxes 2020” with nothing in it at all. I tried undo and redo a few times, no luck. also tried “Verify & Repair Database” but that didn’t help.
I have the source database stored in a folder called “~/Archives/devonthink/Areas.dtbase2/” (dest is Archives.dtbase2 in the same folder)
I see in there a folder called “Backup 2021-05-21 13-17-01/” which is from yesterday.
I also have a time machine backup of my whole computer from yesterday, but I made a bunch of other changes in devonthink today which I don’t want to throw away.
how do I pull the now missing group from that devonthink backup folder? I immediately copied that whole Backup folder somewhere else in case devonthink decides to make another backup and delete it.
is “Taxes 2020” an indexed group, or are/were the items contained in the database?
was anything reported in the log?
did you perform Verify & Repair on both the source and destination databases?
The backup folder you allude to does not contain a backup of your files; it is an internal backup of the database mechanism (i.e. the structure & metadata). That might still be useful, but it won’t contain the items (which I’m guessing will still be there somewhere anyway).
Also I have the databases synced to my own private WebDAV server and it synced to there already. So when I opened my iPad, I saw the items briefly, took a screenshot, then they disappeared. So I at least have a count of the items in the subgroup and names of a few of the items in the Taxes 2020 group.
ok I have a copy of both the databases from the day before I did this, I’ve copied them from time machine to a separate folder on my mac. can I just open these old databases in devonthink and then copy the files?
If you open them at the same time, you will get Duplicate UUID warnings in Window > Log and sync will be suspended for the database(s) until only one copy is open.
ok, yes, it did warn me about the duplicate UUIDs. I right-clicked on the Taxes 2020 and told it to duplicate it to the Archives database I wanted it in, and that seemed to work, so then I closed the backup copy of the Areas (source database) and all seems well so far.
a couple of questions: