Hi, I’ve been looking but can’t find it, so guessing it’s not possible.
I’ve got an indexed folder of videos on a drive that is getting full, so I’ve copied this folder to a new location on a different drive and I want to tell DT to look to this location instead of the current one. – I’ve got things like flags/colours added via DT which I’ll have to recreate if I just delete and re-add in, but I don’t see a way to edit the Path in the Inspector.
Am I right, is this fixed or can I do it somewhere else. If not currently a feature, redefine/relink folder locations would be a useful addition. Thanks.
TLDR: The last 2 paragraphs might offer a solution for you.
For this reason, I used indexed folders very sparingly. They work for me for folder structures that I want to have available in DT (in particular, so that they are available on iOS devices using DTTG; prior to the iOS Files app, this was one of the few great ways to sync content between macOS and iOS, and I still prefer it to Files).
Indexed folders work for me with the following rules obeyed:
essentially no non-trivial meta-data attached (with that I mean thing like tags, labels, comments).
no replication to other parts of the DB
I’ve got things like flags/colours added via DT which I’ll have to recreate if I just delete and re-add in, but I don’t see a way to edit the Path in the Inspector.
Yes, that’s the problem. However, indexed folders on external drives have one advantage. They always mount at the root level of your filesystem. So if you have something indexed on a small external drive with a volume name ExtDrive1 , say in /ExtDrive1/Stuff/MoreStuff/IndexedStuff, you can take a bigger drive, NewBigDrive, and re-name it ExtDrive1 and then put the indexed stuff in exactly the same directory tree structure, and DT will not notice the difference. Unlike macOS, it uses the pathnames for nagivation, not some underlying inode stuff.
Another possibility: If you only attached meta-data, but have not done much replication, you could move the indexed group into a database (e.g. temporarily created on the new, big drive), and once there, you could move the files out again into an indexed structure. I have not tried that, but I think that should preserve the meta-data (but if there are replicated items involved, the replication info might not make it through the export, you’ have to check that first).
gg378, thanks for this information, it’s worth knowing about the name structure and the pulling in then pushing out trick. I appreciate what you say about indexing, I tend to just use it for big files which I can offload to an external hard drive, and I’ve learned not to put much metadata on indexed files, it’s mainly task progress colours.
You’ve confirmed what I thought, so that’s fine, I’ll have a think how to proceed, it probably won’t be a big job if I end up needing to re-add on the new path item before deleting the old. Thanks!
You could first move the indexed items into the database (see menu Data > Move Into Database), then index an empty folder on the desired drive and then move the formerly indexed items inside DEVONthink into the just indexed group. This will automatically perform Data > Move To External Folder.
The path AppleScript property isn’t read-only anymore and therefore can be used to update paths too.