Few days ago, when 2.0 of DT pro went live (from beta) I decided its time to get a license and jump in the water, to see if I can swim.
Everything went smooth, I got a hang of tags, groups etc. I’ve imported several hundred Mb’s of documents during couple of days, sorting various ‘to be sorted’ folders that accumulated over past months.
Roughly at that point, I decided it would be faster if I just copy whole partial libraries (think various attempts to organize filed trough folder structured, few different such folders worth couple of Gb’s).
I dug deeper into instructions and help files, read about inbox folder hiding in ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Inbox and figured it would be interesting to actually just throw stuff into DTpro and sort it later.
I threw several files, pdfs, various UI screenshots etc and code snipplets into this Inbox folders and watched with delight as files got sucked into DTpro. As initial tests worked, I figured it was time to go heavy lifting and threw next batch of files into Inbox. Roughly 500Mb large folder of semi structured batch of files landed in this Inbox folder and than I swapped my attention to other tasks.
After a while, must have been half an hour later or so, DTpro was still hard at work, copying those filed in, according to Activity Monitor, it seemed a bit odd as it was roughly 500Mb that I added into Inbox folder.
It was a that point that I had to change open and change something in one .ai file and upon starting Illustrator (trough Quicksilver) I got greeted with a dialog window, letting me know that Illustrator was moved, weather I want to try to fix it or quit. This caught my attention immediately as I didn’t move it myself.
Next thing you know, I was looking for place where Illustrator was starting from and much to my shock and surprise it was neatly filed inside Inbox.dtBase2 (Inbox.dtBase2/Files.noindex/app/f/Adobe Illustrator CS4.app). I wasn’t sure what was going on and figured it must be some sort of symbolic link, so I dug a bit deeper.
It turned out that somehow, and this is a point where I’m trying to ask for some insight, most of my /Appications folder was neatly moved into this Files.noindex folder inside Inbox.dtBase2 (/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Inbox.dtBase2). Upon checking the size of otherwise empty (empty as far as I can see in DTpro, as all my files were moved into different database I created) inbox, showed me roughly 11Gb of data was stored inside this Files.noindex folder neatly stored in folders in range of 201 folders each named after file type that was stored inside.
What I would like to ask, if anyone can shed some light into how this came to be. Did I turn some wrong switch in preferences (only thing I seem to recall doing is that I told DTpro to directly import to my database not to Inbox database, when I import files).
I’m eager to use DTpro and organize abundance of various UI screenshots I accumulated over the years, and all other files, but at the same time, feel a tad bit weary at this point as it took me couple of hours to restore all files back to /Applications from Time machine backup.
Just in case I also made disk image of that Files.noindex folder, should it prove to be any help in uncovering this mystery for me.
I would like to ask for help, anything you can hint at, anything that might lead to import of all those applications, settings, sample files etc. I’m quite sure I didn’t drag /Applications folder to the inbox and any given time. All I remember is dropping that roughly 500Mb large folder with tons of files in Inbox and roughly half an hour later I ran into Illustrator app that was moved.