I index a folder structure with several thousand nested folders containing PDF files in it. The index is from the top level of the folder structure (so, not individual items). I have in the past replicated some of the PDF files into groups in DEVONthink. Yesterday, I trashed a couple of the groups containing replicated items. Today, I emptied the trash, and got an unexpected warning:
After clicking “remove imported items”, I checked to see what was left in the trash, and it appears to be the two groups containing the replicants. The DEVONthink user manual states “if you delete a replicant of an indexed file and empty the database’s trash, this will have no effect on the files in the Finder”. But looking at the files in the trash, they do not indicate they are replicants:
Much more worrying, however, is that doing a “reveal” on these files sends me to the indexed folders on disk where the files are located – they appear to be the original files outside of DEVONthink. If I empty DEVONthink’s trash again but click “Remove all items” this time, I expect it will delete the files on disk. And that would be bad.
My problem now is that I can’t be 100% certain that all those items were replicated. What if I accidentally moved instead of replicated some of the PDFs, when I was collecting them into those folders? I can’t tell from what I’m seeing in the trash, and if they end up deleted, it would be a fair amount of work to reconstruct where they came from on disk.
