Sorry I’m a complete newbie to DT, and not even sure it will do what I need. I’ve looked at some of the documentation and feel a-bit overwhelmed with it.
I’ve a fairly narrow question…
I’m on a Mac with a SnapScan Scanner ix500. I’ve sent everything over to SnapScan Cloud who converted it into searchable PDF, then saved it to Evernote.
I’m finding Evernote unreliable, so I’ve just bought a NAS Drive, a WD EX2 4TB raid. So I’d like to scan, convert to pdf the file it on the NAS. I’d like to search in spotlight on my Mac for documents where the search is conducted on the NAS. So my Mac holds nothing. The databases etc are all held on the NAS.
So, my question is - where do I start. Am I mapping a shared Folder? or can I connect to the NAS server? I’ve tried various bits but nothing is making sense.
I second @rkaplan’s welcome and would suggest you read the Help > Documentation > In & Out > Importing & Indexing section. If this is a desktop Mac, you could index the folder on the NAS, leaving the files where they are. It’s also possible on a laptop but the files would be reported as missing if the NAS wasn’t mounted when you took it off network.
@mthomas_uk I use DEVONthink for an application similar to yours. I also have a ScanSnap ix500, and have ScanSnap Manager (you could also use ScanSnap Home if you prefer) set up to scan directly into DT. Scanned files end up in the DT Inbox (DT does the OCR to searchable PDF), and I then classify them and place them in the correct folder in the DT database. I then use the native DT search to find things, rather than Spotlight. As others have said, the DT database should be on your hard drive, and you can use the NAS for backup and/or syncing to DT on other Macs and/or DT To Go on iOS devices.
With that all said, if you REALLY wanted to scan to the NAS and keep your files there, and use Spotlight for searching, you really don’t need DT. All you need to do is create a folder on the NAS as your scanning destination, set up ScanSnap Manager (or Home) to scan to that folder and use the Abbey OCR that comes with the ScanSnap software to automatically convert to searchable PDF during scanning. You can keep the files in one folder, or move them to other folders on the NAS as you like. Then you can just use Spotlight to find files on the NAS.
As I said, that would work, but I think DT’s search is more powerful, and DT has other functionality as well that I use.