I have an older MacBook and it’s running very slow partly because I have too much on the HD. So, I would like to decrease the amount of strain on the HD by moving my DT Pro Files to a Firewire 2TB Drive. The application would remain on the computer itself but, all files and storage would by on the external drive.
Will I run into any problems doing this and are any hidden files or anything else which should be considered as well?
Chris
Depends on what you mean by ‘all files and storage’. If what you are moving to the external drive are databases that have all the data imported, then you will be fine. Just close the databases in DEVONthink before the move, then launch the app and open them again. If your databases contain documents that are indexed, then that will be problematic. You cannot move the documents to a different drive (or even a different location on the same drive) and maintain the index link.
User-created databases and their corresponding documents are the only thing I might want on another drive-was there anything else in particular that you were planning on moving off the main drive?
I don’t know what “indexed” means so, not to make a mistake, I won’t move files.
If you don’t know what “indexed” is then you probably are not doing it and it is perfectly safe to move the database.I used to have mine working from an external drive as well. I’ve never had any problems with it.
By the way, go here to find out more about indexing (really useful if you do store things in an external drive).
Hi. If you don’t know what “indexed” means, then you probably are not doing it, and you’ll have nothing to worry about. I’ve got some of my databases on external drives. It works fine.
Of course, you should always be backing up everything on your drive (I recommend Time Machine), and doing this has the added benefit of making decisions like this easy – if something goes wrong, just rely on your backup(s).
Indexing is pretty cool, especially if you are up against local storage limits, so you might want to take a look at this explanation to get an idea of how it works.
Chiming in here with a similar issue. I’ve had computer problems and am moving to a new machine without benefit of Time Machine’s restore functions. (Yes, I have plenty of backups, but erratic behavior on the old machine means we don’t want to inadvertently transfer any oddities to the new one. I’m transferring documents, but installing all programs from the ground up.)
My questions are about DevonThink Pro Office (2.7.6), with which I am not yet in any way adept.
I will be moving my database (such as it is) to an external drive. It’s taken me a while to figure out how to find the database (for those with a similar issue, the database extension is .dtBase2 --not easy information to locate).
What I am puzzled by is the SIZE of this file, once I located it again (it was in Dropbox). It’s only 23KB. Hunh? Can this possibly be a database containing a lot of web pages and other clippings? (I haven’t connected my primary research folders yet, which are managed by Bookends.)
Or should I be looking for something else to transfer to that external drive as I get DTPO up and running on this new system?
Thanks in advance. . . .
Two comments: (1) We recommend against storing DEVONthink databases in Dropbox, as Dropbox wasn’t designed to handle dynamic databases and damage is probable. (2) No, that cannot be a complete, functioning database file; keep looking for at least one more database with the .dtBase2 filename extension.
Got it, thanks!
Digging out the extension helped a lot. It gave me something to search on, and I found the real database in my Documents file, where it should have been (and that file is a good deal larger than the one in Dropbox–I have no idea what the Dropbox one is, but it helped me figure out what extension I should be looking for, so it served a purpose).
My goal is to have the database on the computer I’m using, and the larger files on the external drive. But I don’t know enough yet about how the program works to be secure in understanding the interactions between those two files.