Hi folks, I am trying to track down a seemingly random occurence. I have a folder that lives in dropbox imported into devonthink. Over the last few days I have noticed that a file that I had recently edited in the terminal has subsequently been deleted from dropbox. Fortunately I was able to restore. Is it possible that the indexing/importing is causing the problem? I have noticed this happen to files in folder which are not imported into devonthink. Thoughts?
That’s an oxymoron. A “folder” can’t exist both in Dropbox AND imported to DEVONthink. Which is it? Indexed or Imported?
My guess is that you indexed the files from the Dropbox folder into a group in DEVONthink. At this point, best you re-read about indexing files in the “DEVONthink Handbook”, starting page 51. Pay particular attention to the guidance about changes to indexed files. And also make sure your Dropbox synching is happening as expected. And check Dropbox support forums and support staff on what might be causing this.
Is the Dropbox folder set to local sync? You may want to see this post, and potentially the rest of that thread too.
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Thanks folks, I think this was indeed the issue. Is there a quick way to get a list of all imported folders and indexed folders in my databases? I need to check the setup of each one.
Great - how about detecting imported folders?
It might be worth your time taking a look at the nomenclature. Anything placed in DEVONthink is imported; if you have imported a file or folder, it will be inside DEVONthink. Any changes made will only be reflected in DEVONthink - the file lives there.
If you have indexed a folder, then that folder and its contents will be mirrored in DEVONthink. The folder and its contents live outside DEVONthink. I would urge you to read pp 51 of the current (DT 3.8) handbook.
So, detecting imported folders: everything which is not indexed is imported; importing is the default behaviour. But you are not having trouble with imported files - they are their own entity, living in DT.
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Understood - I guess I was hoping there was a way to detect the difference between groups created within DT and those imported from the filesystem.
Not that I know of; I’ve just experimented, and there are no obviously discerning features. May I ask why it would help you to be able to discern the two?
There may be folders that at some point I intended to index but accidentally imported instead.
Thanks, that makes sense to me. I think you may have to check that manually - i.e. list the indexed folders and check them against those folders you expected to have indexed. I hope it’s not too many…
(And my explanation of importing and indexing may have been too strict, in that you probably knew what you were doing, and I misunderstood what you were trying to do. Apologies!)
No worries, I think at some point I understood, then may have forgotten, and now understand again. In the meantime I may have messed some things up 
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