I have accidentally created a New Group in my Household Files.dtbase2 for 2020 Household Files. These are replicants. The actual files are stored under /Household Files/2021/Utilities/2020. This was an accident; I’m not sure how I did this. I want to move these files to /Household Files/2020 but still have them properly referenced under Household Files.dtbase2/2020 in DEVONthink 3.
What is the best way to accomplish this? Thank you very much.
Welcome @jacq
These are replicants.
What do you mean by this? They’re replicants as the term is used in DEVONthink?
Creating a new group doesn’t automatically create replicants and it’s unclear what you’re describing here.
Sorry. Let me try to clarify.
Yes, these are replicants as defined in DEVONthink as I understand it. This is reflected by the icon to the right of the item name. The items show up in the first level Group called 2020 in the _Household Files database. However, the path to the actual files on the hard drive are in a subfolder called Utilities under the 2021 folder. That is, Household Files/2021/Utilities/2020…
This is not what I intended. I intended all the 2020 items to be in a subfolder Household Files/2020. I can move the actual folder on the hard drive easily enough, but I fear this will break the “link”, if that is the right word, to all the items in the 2020 group in DEVONthink.
Does that better clarify my issue? Appreciate any help.
You can delete any replicants as you see fit.
A replicant is just an instance of an item, so if you replicate a file there are two instances of the file.
Change one, the other also changes because they are the same file.
However, delete one and there is only one instance of the file now.
So you indexed these files?
Yes, I indexed the files. I’m not sure that I understand how that changes things in this situation. I’m probably missing something.
I think what I need to do is:
Unfortunately, I think I will lose all of the tags from the originally replicated items.
You didn’t explicitly mention that you indexed them. Without knowing that one can read info like /Household Files/2021/Utilities/2020 as a DEVONthink location. In fact I had to read your posts several times to grasp what is meant. It’s a good idea to be explicit about indexed files or at least use “Finder path” or something like that 
Still not sure I understood your setup. You could create a test database and index test folders and files (not the ones from your Household Files database) to see whether the following does what you want:
Move the 2020 test group into the database via Data > Move Into Database.
Move the imported group into the desired 2020 group.
This will make it an indexed group again.
Ungroup the 2020 subgroup via Data > Ungroup Items.
Thank you.
OK, I now understand how that would be confusing. I’ll be more careful. Still very much a newbie with DEVONthink.
I will follow your suggestion to set up a test database. I think I need to work with this some more to get better feel how all of these concepts work together. It appears to me that I still have some sort of brain block in understanding all of the differences among moving files into DEVONthink, duplicating files once in DEVONthink, creating replicants in DEVONthink of files inside v. outside of DEVONthink, and indexing files and folders in DEVONthink. Obviously, there is great power and flexibility here, but the learning curve seems steep, at least to me.
Thanks again.