Hello, I’ve owned DTPO for a while now, but have only been tinkering with it and Devonthink To Go a little. This summer I finally have some time off, and I’m preparing to change my life around next year, move to a new country, and would really like to be more mobile, and able to fit in a cheap, tiny 1-room apartment again. I’m a newbie, so I apologize if this is posted in the wrong forum (I would have posted in the ‘Newbie’ section if there was one).
Basically, I’m preparing to scan about 500 books, 500 magazines, and thousands of pieces of paper. I’m not even worried yet about organizing the database for the perfect research project, I’ll only be using simple tags to cover a wide range of subjects.
I own DTPO, an S1500M Scanner, a 2009 Macbook that’s been getting really slow lately, was going to invest in an OtherWorldComputing 480 gb SSD Drive, but now am thinking about instead getting one of the brand new Macbook Air (256 gb of flash space) or Mac Minis (at least 500 gb). I will wait to get that soon before really beginning my Devonthink project.
To help me decide, I’m trying to figure out how much space I will need for all the scanned PDF files (aside from the obvious portability, processor speed issues). Let’s say: 500 books * 300 pages= 150,000 OCR’ed pdfs. And then magazines where I’d like to have the full contents, pictures kept as they are: 500 magazines * 100 pages=50,000 OCR’ed 8.5 by 11/A4-sized pages with pictures, etc. Can anyone give me an idea on what sort of space I will be needing before beginning such a task? I’ll do the calculations myself, but if anyone has a rough reference point for the stuff I’m asking about, I’d really appreciate it, I just have no idea of how much space I should set aside. I’ve seen comparisons between Adobe OCRing and ABBYY that give measurements like 1.5 MB or so for a page, but I don’t know if I should be expecting to use a lot less for my books than for my magazines, which is why I differentiated above.
I do own a couple of external HDs with 2 TB each or so, but IF the total contents of the above (along with other notes, papers, stuff, pictures saved from Aperture/iPhoto—maybe that’s a whole other story) become more than the 100 or 500 gb available to me in my new computer hard drive, for example, can I store parts of my Devonthink database on my external hard drive, all files over 50 mb for instance, or is this not generally done by Devonthink looking to access their data relatively quickly? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding some of the main principles of the Devonthink database method in even asking this though.
If it matters, I intend to read the scanned files later on with my current Kindle, or maybe a future iPad 3 or larger e-reader…I’ve been using calibre to make epub/mobi files, which is usually fine, but there are sometimes errors in the spelling that is picked up from the pdfs there.
I have not yet bought my cutter yet for the books, but will be doing that soon as well.
Anyway, thanks for any possible help.