sorry for my frequent questions at the time, but I’m trying to work with my big and important database (under high pressure) and there are many things going wrong… maybe lacking experience with DevonThink Pro or whatever…
I tried to sort out the documents which I’ll have to process first.
Most of them are indexed documents which are not saved directly in the Database.
I wanted to replicate those which were not yet tagged to an extra group to sort them and tag them in order of their priority.
Anyway, Now I see that those documents in this group “to tag” do not have any replicants! I must have moved them there instead of replicating them… (
Now I’m very close to despair, because they were originally located in different paths and now they are missing there…
And I can not go back to backup of the database without losing the tagging information which cost me a lot of time.
So is there a way to move the items back to their original location automatically?
Theoretically the information is in the “path”, but this seems not to be searchable…
I tried to synchronize the folder again where those documents were originally located, but the number of documents does not increase.
Only if I drag them back from the finder with Cmd-opt pressed, I can “restore” them and they have the correct new tags, but they are not marked as a duplicate or replicant although the version in the “to tag” folder still exists.
Is there a way to export the tags assigned by DT pro directly to the real indexed file (as meta information or anything similar)?
There is no way to automatically return them to the original location that I am aware of.
Synchronizing an indexed folder will not put them back to the original location, as it is possible to move indexed documents in the database, the documents remained indexed, yet the group structure will be different from the folder structure in the Finder. Working with indexed databases can be tricky, especially when moving and replicating documents within the database. A better option for what you are wanting to do in this situation would have been to create a smart group.
The OpenMeta tags that DEVONthink uses are written to indexed documents immediately-no need to export, sync, etc.
I had used a smart group at first (don’t ask me why I then created a normal group).
Anyway, I had searched in the SmartGroup for some especially important Keywords to extract those “VIP documents” first and decided* to put them in a subgroup… (* I don’t remember why).
“The OpenMeta tags that DEVONthink uses are written to indexed documents immediately-no need to export, sync, etc.”
That means that if I assign a tag to an indexed document in DevonThink, the file itself will contain those tags as meta-information.
So even if I move the file to another computer or index it with another DTPro database, it will have this tag information?
That would mean:
even if I’d throw away my whole database and start fresh (beware, I’m not gonna do that), I could preserve the tags as they are kept in the file system and not in the DTPro database themselves?
That would be very good news…
So that would mean, if it’s only about tagging I could trash the documents and index them again without having to tag again…?!.
… phew.
p.s. Greg, you don’t know how relieved I am (just tried indexing some of my folders with a new test db and it’s true - the tags are still/again there!!)
thanks, you* saved my day!! – I was already close to jumping out of the window (metaphorically speaking)
*and surely those who programmed that feature - thanks guys!
If you have a complex tagging structure (which it appears is the case) you might find some help with the current version of Ammonite, a third-party tag browser that can be used on DT databases as well as your OpenMeta tags on files outside DT. The demo license period should get you over the difficult period of your project.
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