Saved documents disappeared but "appearing" as duplicates

DEVONthink Tips
1

Can someone help me to resolve a bizarre problem which I encountered this morning?

I have a small business which I run from home for which I have a folder in DTPO containing Groups for each client in which I file copies of notes of phone conversations, emails and documents.

I scan any notes of conversations with clients and any documents completed if I see clients at my home into DTPO using my Fujitsu ScanSnap as and when I make them .

The business involves me seeing clients in 2 different locations to complete documents. An assistant in each office takes scanned copies of the final documents created at each appointment resulting in PDFs and then sends me by email the PDFs of scanned documents on a daily basis. I transfer those PDFs into DTPO every evening so that I maintain an uptodate virtual file for each client so far as documents are concerned

Just to complete the picture, every fortnight I save emails from the relevant account in Mail on my iMac by highlighting the Messages and then clicking on the Add to DEVONThink Pro Office tab in the dropdown list in Messages in Mail and once they are in DTPO I then move them to the relevant folder. I accept that this way I only have a complete uptodate virtual file once a fortnight but I can access the emails through Mail in the interim and the process has worked fine for the last 18 months or so since I started the system

This morning, when I was in the throes of my fortnightly email transfer, I noticed that some of the Groups to which I know I had moved PDFs of documents within the last few days were empty. Fortunately the PDFs of the missing documents were still accessible in Trash on my iMac so I moved them to Desktop and from there to the relevant Inbox in DTPO proposing to file them again - there are about 150 of them. To my surprise, most of the PDFs showed as Duplicates indicating that copies are lurking somewhere in DTPO but not where I filed them and I can’t find them!

There’s no problem with the historical emails saved or the notes/documents scanned using Scan Snap

Is there any way that one can easily check where the duplicate indicated is located? Any solutions would be much appreciated

2

Yes. Here’s a quick read: blog.devontechnologies.com/2014/ … evonthink/

Also, I hope you are bring diligent in your backups. We strongly advocate observing proper primary backups using TimeMachine (or similar application) and local external drives.

3

Thanks very much for that - all now sorted! This is a wonderful resource

I do back up regularly - constantly with Time Machine and weekly using DTPO’s own facility. However, although I tried to check on any DTPO backup within Time Machine I couldn’t find it. I’m obviously not looking in the right place, could you possibly point me in the right direction please?

4

Tools > Backup and Optimize does an internal metadata backup inside the database. It is not a file backup.

As far as your databases, we would have no idea where you stored any separate databases, but a Spotlight search for .dtBase2 can help you locate them.
The Global Inbox for DEVONthink Pro / Pro Office is stored at ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Inbox.dtbase2.
The Global Inbox for DEVONthink Personal is the ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink 2 folder.