File > Index… and choose a folder in the Finder. The files will appear in the group in DEVONthink, all (including the parent group) will have a curved arrow denoting the indexed status.
Add a file in the Finder.
Select the indexed group in the database. The file appears.
Remove a file in the Finder.
Select the indexed group in the database. The file disappears.
Add a file to the indexed group in DEVONthink. The file will not appear in the Finder folder unless you right-click the file or group in the database and choose Move to External Folder.
If you index a single file, it will work fine too.
Outside of this, adding files to some location in the Finder that is not indexed will obviously have no effect on the database.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Folders in finder are indexed. The files come into the inbox, and I create groups and move them to these groups. So when I add a file in one of the folders in finder that have been indexed, there is no particular group to update as I created all the groups myself after importing the files.
Just an observation from a relatively new user: the way indexing works, you benefit greatly from indexing the folder, rather than your approach of indexing a file and then moving it to a group.
If you index the folder, you get the benefit of automatic updating, so the DT index remains current as the folder contents change (files are created, deleted, edit etc).
If you want to be able to access the files via a different structure in DT, I would suggest you look at using replicants in your personal managed groups. That way you can have DT maintain an accurate index but access the files via whatever DT structure works for you.
If you go that route, you may be able to explore scripting and auto-classifying to automate the process of creating the replicants where you want them as you update the indices.
Indexing many individual files is bound to create significant confusion. I almost always index entire folders only.
Any new files that come in, I add to DTPO then “Move to external folder” once I use DTPO to sort it to the appropriate group.
I also replicate and tag indexed files with abandon. Replicants can cause some grief if you “Move into database” then “Move to external folder” because it’s destination in the Finder seems to be a bit unpredictable, but this isn’t something I do very often.
(If I want to do a really big, DTPO-assisted sorting, what I’ll do is move EVERYTHING into the database, do all my sorting and re-grouping, then move the entire batch back to external folder, but this really only n needs to happen once in a blue moon, when I need to seriously re-configure my taxonomy in such a way that I need to do a complete rebuild, which is usually less than once a year).