How to Deal With Duplicates in Devonthink Personal

DEVONthink Tips
1

New user of the Devonthink Product line, so I downloaded the Personal version for a trial. I am still wrapping my hear around the interface and the concepts, but slowly but surely I’m sort of getting it.

After a few days of doing the basics (i.e. getting the synching right between Macs) I did some imports of information from various external sources (i.e. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc), to try to consolidate things. I also did an import of Evernote, which I think probably was a mistake.

In all this effort the system created and logged quite a few duplicates. Some of this is because I have used Dropbox in the past as my “backup” for a lot of things, so, the main files are on my computer and they get synched to Dropbox. Hence they are in both places.

In the “upper” Devonthink products (Not Personal like I have now), I understand there is some automatic method that the system uses for resolving duplicates. On the the Personal version, I haven’t found anything. So that poses some questions:

  1. How do users of the Personal Product deal with duplicates?

  2. If the answer to 1 is “manually only” then, if you delete duplicates in that folder, does that physically remove the original file in that location or just the reference to it in Devonthink?

Thanks for all your advice and help!

2
  1. Though scripted solutions are only available to Pro / Pro Office, I would check out this blog post: blog.devontechnologies.com/2014 … evonthink/
  2. It puts the file from the database in its Trash, unless you’re using indexing. The default behavior is importing, which copies the files into the database.

I hope that helps.