"Missing file"

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi,

I have recently updated my version of DevonThink Pro Office. For whatever reason, the files (PDF and notes) within each group are empty and tell me that “missing file”. The web archives are also missing.

Please tell me that my stuff is still somewhere rather than lost!!!

2

Although I don’t have enough information to guess about the cause of your database problems, I’m quite sure that it didn’t result from opening it under the most recent beta release.

  1. Quit DT Pro Office. In the Finder, Control-click on your database file and choose the contextual menu option to archive the file. This will result in a zipped copy of the database. Keep the archive for possible future use in recovery of your information.

Note: Never make a Finder copy of a database while it is open, as the copy may be incomplete or have errors.

  1. Launch DT Pro. Choose Tools > Restore Backup. Choose the most recent internal Backup and confirm. Discussion: Restore Backup is a reversible operation that swaps the current state of the database with the state at the time of the backup. The database will have lost information about any modifications subsequent to the time of the backup.

  2. When Restore Backup is complete, examine the database. If there are still obvious problems, return to step 2) and choose the next most recent Backup folder.

If the database appears complete, run Tools > Verify & Repair. If there are errors that cannot be corrected by a subsequent run of Tools > Verify & Repair, it is likely that there were already database problems at the time the backup was made. Return to set 2) and choose the next most recent Backup folder.

If you are using Time Machine, try recovering an earlier version of your database from Time Machine backups.

If you are unable to recover your database in this way, please send a message to Support, noting that you still have a zipped copy of the damaged DT Pro 2 database.

Comment about backups. Whenever I’ve invested substantial time and effort in modifying a database, I do not wait for a scheduled backup. I manually invoke Tools > Verify & Repair, followed by Tools > Backup & Optimize. Or, I run (and recommend) Scripts > Export > Backup Archive, which will verify, optimize and produce internal and external backups during a break time. The external archive is the smallest possible compressed and dated backup of the database, and is suitable for storage on external media (or offsite) in case of a hard drive failure or other mishaps.

3

Thanks Bill,

I don’t get the option to “restore backup”. I tried it on various scenarios but the words are never highlighted.

I don’t think it was the update that did it- its just that that was the only thing that had changed. At this point, everything in my database is missing the file. Including PDFs that I OCRed, webarchives, notes…everything.

Also, when I Control-Click on the database in Finder and choose Show Package Contents- there is nothing in the database. Whereas in a new database I created as a test, I can locate each individual file in the database folder.

What else can I do?