Preserving Original File

I am a practicing Expert Witness for legal cases involving Electric Overhead Cranes. I have about 50 primary reference books and another hundred or so reference articles, manuals, and regs.

I will typically use about a dozen primary and secondary references for each case. I will review the books/articles and highlight those sentences/paragraphs relevant to the case at hand.

My problem is that if I ever convert duplicates to replicants, all the versions get merged. I need to maintain at least a single virgin (unmarked or annotated) version. I’ve tried changing the document name of the virgin copy (for example, adding a “V” to the document name. As you have probably already guessed, sometimes DT sees through my naming changes and considers the various versions of the document as a “duplicate”.

Bottom line: Is there a way to preserve a virgin edition of a file in this situation?

Many thanks for considering my request.

FYI, could you please hurry the developers along with the Gold version of DT4. I can’t wait. Also, I think the new payment scheme is a fair and equitable policy. I’m in no rush to pay more money, but I also want you to put the pedal to the metal and be working on DT5.

Thanks for a great piece of software.

Respectfully
Larry Dunville

Perhaps simply take a copy (duplicate using DEVONthink nomenclature) and put that duplicate in a group or even another database, say called “Virgin”, and don’t touch.

And what’s your specific use case for doing this?

A smart rule triggered Before Saving could automatically handle this.