Hello, I know very little about Devonthink. However, I think I am ready to move full force into it. This will mean migrating my scan snap home scanned images and my Obsidian notes. I know that there is an obsidian integration, but one reason for migrating is to have a single source instead of the 2 or 3 I usually deal with…
QUESTIONS:
1: How many databases should I use. For example, right now I have an obsidian folder and a flat file storage folder called “pets”. and from there I have a folder for each pet with notes in obsidian and important files in a flat folder with scanned documents. Would I create a separate database for pets? Al in all, I have about a dozen categories. Would I go ahead and match my current structure and make 12 databases?
1.5: As I experiment I see that a single database, though there are “groups” it still seems to sort of jam everything together. would a best approach be to create a database for each pet, to easily organize? Is the proper approach to Devonthink to create lots of databases? or fewer databases with tags and such to organize?
2: I plan to import my notes from obsidian manually into text files in Devon think. I want to do it like this as a chance to review my notes and see what I really need. However, what is the best way to move my folders that contain PDFs and images in? Do I just select all and drag them into devonthink where I want them to live? do I point the database at a folder? Thanks sorry, for the noob question.
anything else I might be missing? thanks! sorry, im researching a bit on my own, but hoping for some comments from experienced users. thanks
Welcome @DoctorEvil and no worries! We were all beginners at one time. 
This is determined either by personal preference or the dictates of a group setting, e.g., in a corporate environment. As noted in the Getting Started > Building Your Database section of the built-in Help and manual, we suggest smaller, more focused databases when possible.
Again, this is is dependent on the situation and your personal approach / perspective. You think the way you think; I think the way I think. Those perspectives can often be quite different. This is especially true regarding tagging. See the Getting Started > Tagging section in the aforementioned.
There are two methods to getting documents into DEVONthink: importing and indexing.
Importing copies (or alternately moves) files into the internal structure of the database.
Indexing leaves the files where they are located but treats them as if they’re in the database.
However, as attractive as indexing may seem when presented so simply, there are good reasons it is not the default behavior. See the In & Out > Importing and Indexing section of the Help and manual and understand the Indexing and the filesystem section before you commit to using indexing.
Here’s a simple truth: If you can use the Finder for organization, you can use DEVONthink. And how you’d approach the organization in the Finder can be translated to DEVONthink. If you’d use few groups and many tags, DEVONthink supports that. If you’d use deeply nested hierarchies of folders, DEVONthink also supports that.
I hope that helps.
Make sure you have back ups of everything before you start. That is what experience taught me. I think it is good practice to back up before any large scale changes on Macs anyway? The reason in this case is that one can make some bad user error things at first and it is possible to scramble your files in various ways, I always got them back but once I did use, for speed, a backup: I made some silly ‘smart rules’ for example that executed literally once. I forget the details.
Then drag and drop wholesale. It is a long time since I did it, I put everything in DEVONthink 3 straight away, even screenshots go into the Inbox and get moved by a smart rule from there into another database. I don’t index much and haven’t found a lot of use for it myself and I only recently made some tags. I think it can get confusing and it is best to add things, even at that grain, as you proceed, even afer months or in my case years.
BlueFrog already said everything anyway. As for number of databases, from reading here there seems a lot of variation, depending on what you use it for. I keep it to about 8 I think, I avoid making them too big as Bluefrog says.
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