SOS: DevonNote can't find my data

Greetings, all.

I never intended my first post to be a plea for help, but here I am. :blush:

Since late 2007, I have been keeping a series of notes for a book project in DevonNote. At last glance, there were about 150 notes stored in .rtf format, covering some 40,000 words. Opening DevonNote 1.9.13 (Intel iMac, OS X 10.5.2) for the first time in about 4 weeks (teaching has kept me away from my project), many strange things are occurring:

  1. The usual DevonNote start up screen does not appear.
  2. The usual database window does not open.
  3. Almost all items in the File, Edit, Data, etc. menus are grayed out (including Verify & Repair and all the other ones one might invoke in a situation like this).
  4. Selecting About DevonNote fails to bring up the About screen.

Poking around on my hard drive, I find that my notes seem to have been preserved in ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/DevonNote. DevonNote cannot open them, but TextEdit can.

What must I do to make DevonNote function properly and rediscover my data?

Any and all advice much appreciatedā€¦

LexM

That observation that DEVONnote canā€™t display ā€œAbout DEVONnoteā€ indicates that something may have gone wrong with the application itself, your disk directory, your operating system or all of the above.

Have you had anything unusual happen, such as a power outage? It might be time to run Disk Utilityā€™s disk verify routine.

Your database is the folder named DEVONnote at ~/Library/Application Support/. The metadata stuff you found in information made available to Spotlight to support Spotlight searches of your database content.

Although I rarely recommend this, Iā€™ll suggest that you reinstall DEVONnote. Assuming that your database is in its proper location, it should open after the reinstallation. If thereā€™s still a problem, try (with DEVONnote quit) deleting the file named com.devon-technologies.note.plist at ~/Library/Preferences/.

You might also check if anything has been logged to the system console 8see /Applications/Utilities/Console.app).