Hi, folks. Looking for some advice. Over the years I’ve accumulated some really useful DEVONthink databases for personal documents, documentation, research, etc. I sync this data via WebDAV on my own web server so I have easy access to my work from D2G. All is well.
It occurs to me that my spouse and even children might find access to this data useful, particularly in the event I’m unavailable for whatever reason.
If I were license DEVONthink and/or DEVONthink To Go for each of them, would they be able to access these data stores? I know DEVONthink isn’t a multi-user database and I’m concerned their access would be problematic for my data integrity. Perhaps read-only access is a possibility?
Secondly, if the scenario I describe is possible, would I be able to limit access of specific databases to specific people?
If your WebDAV server was set up for access outside your network, it’s possible they could connect to it and sync the databases to their local machines. However, that would not provide read-only access.
Perhaps, creating a secondary family database and curating only items you want to share into it.
You could also create separate sync locations, and allow access to certain people to sync databases from them. But again, this would not be read-only access.
But multi-device syncing works very well in my experience. So if you don’t need to differentiate between your stuff and your family member’s stuff in a shared database, then I don’t think that DT will treat things any differently with multiple people syncing from different devices/accounts than it would you syncing from different devices.
My wife and I share the “family records” database this way without incident.
Yes, I see what you’re saying. It really isn’t different from me using multiple devices, as I do now, to access my own data. The realistic possibility that multiple family members would try to modify the database at the same time is, practically speaking, very low.
Of course, having the ability to password-protect a database for “read-only” access would be a nice capability to help ensure that reference materials like, say, birth certificates, aren’t accidentally deleted.