"Mark as Locked" doesn't go far enough?

DEVONthink Tips
1

I’ve been trying to figure out how to mark many of my RSS feeds (and other items in other databases) such that the won’t accidentally get deleted.

I usually “check” those that I want to save, which works well enough. today i thought I’d look into the “Mark as Locked” feature that you can invoke either through the Data > Mark as… > Locked or by right-clicking the item.

It turns out that “locking” the items don’t prevent them from being deleted! A check in the Help document provides this terse message:

• Locked/Unlocked: Items can be locked to keep them from being unintentionally modified.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. I’d say that deleting something is an extreme modification and should be prevented as well. However, that’s not the current opinion of the DT team.

Is there some other way of marking something as “indestructible” or protected from accidental deletion?

Thanks!

2

The RSS preference tab says “lock feeds or articles to prevent automatic removal”, so locking is useful as a protection against DT’s cleanup actions.

3

Thanks. However, when I go to the RSS tab in prefs, no matter what I do that line “Lock feeds or articles to prevent automatic removal” remains gray. I’ve tried all the options next to “Remove articles” and checked the “Also unread articles” but none of these seem to protect the articles from accidental deletion.

4

I should add that if I do click the “Lock” option, the little padlock appears but I can still hit the backspace key and the item gets trashed.

5

I believe the “Lock feeds or articles…” text in the preference is informational rather than a setting that is gray when inactive and black when active.

and

Have you actually had any articles deleted? My experience is that if you hit the backspace key, the article will be moved to the trash bucket, however as long as it is locked it will not be deleted from the trash. It works a little differently from how the Finder deletes locked items.

6

Also as a follow-up, the Remove Articles setting only applies to articles that remain in the RSS feed. Or putting it another way, if you move the html document(s) out of the feed and into a folder they will not be auto-deleted even if left unlocked.

7

@Greg_jones: Good call on emptying the trash!

I really hadn’t thought of things working quite that way but you’re right that emptying the trash doesn’t delete locked files.

Part of the problem here is that I tend not to empty DTPO’s trash all that often and when I do, I never check to see if it was fully emptied.

The things one learns on this forum! Thanks for sussing that out for me. The mystery is now solved.