New Multi-purpose DT System Setup

DEVONthink
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I am 78ys with very little modern technology experience so knowing what or best to do needs some research and advice. My primary goal is to use DEVONthink as a legacy stores system for three UK family trusts. I manage these and will hold all records and data needed for estate and taxes in DEVONthink. Having set all this up I will ask use the architecture to help me manage digital assets in my many and varied personal activities.

My son who lives in the US will be given access to the trusts databases during my life as they will need it on death so it is important I get this setup right. He is computer and technology literate and will be able to manage the system if I pass before my wife.

I work mostly on an IMac, MacBook and iPhone and have set up WebDAV sync to cloud storage in DT and DTTG. from my desktop IMac, MacBook and my iPhone.

My IMac is my local data repository and local store to hold all 15yrs worth of documents and I might live for another 20yrs. The documents are imported into Devon think and I include notes and tags for ease of searching.

I have a synology drive backup task from my IMC to local NAS which also has a synology backup task to a local USB drive. I do not use iCloud for anything other than photos and email storage. My email is managed by me on IONOS servers and local Airmail clients. I use folders in iCloud to hold stored emails only. I do not use apple mail.

Finally I sync folders from my IMac to a Pcloud storage. All this has grown piecemeal over many years and I want my new setup to be transparent and automated so that I work in DT and not finder.

I am curating my current folder/storage mess and importing clean folders into several domain specific DT databases. I would like advice from more expert people that what I am doing myself is reasonable, workable and will stand the test of time. So any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks and sorry it’s so long but it is a big issue for me to sort out on my own.

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So your legacy plan is to leave Mac Devonthink databases
My plan is platform/app agnostic
with backups that include an export using the Folders & Files option
stored on a cloud server (Arq)

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Very little modern technology experience? That’s not how you come across in your post!

The fact that you can describe the task in such detail suggests that you’ll have no trouble at all with DEVONthink. It’s one of the more intuitively designed pieces of software I’ve run across.

The manual and other written docs are quite good, but, if you have the time, the video course done by David Sparks at MacSparky Field Guides is excellent. It certainly jump-started my learning with DEVONthink.

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I have enrolled on the course. It was AI and myself that developed the proposed solution. I will now try to educate myself with the help of the course.

Many thanks for the introduction

Gally

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I think it is a great project. I agree with @DTLow however about being platform agnostic. It is pretty hard to find any software that will withstand the “test of time.”

Might I suggest that DT is a great system for organizing the information but for the actual shared workproduct an Export into Files and Folders would be a good idea? If you include the resulting DevonStorage metadata files and a copy of the Devonthink user manual then someone tech savvy would still be able to reconstruct your Deovnthink database; but worst-case a basic file/folder structure seems more likely to be readable with future technology than a Devonthink database.

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Or, keep the file folder hierarchy. Index it instead of import it. Work in Devonthink, have an accessible repository without the need to even know what Devonthink is or how to use it.

Have your cake and eat it too!

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