I’ve fitted up my 2010 Macbook Pro with an SSD to replace the original hard drive, and a new 7200 hard drive in the optical drive bay. Whoa! It’s like I bought a new computer.
I’m keep the operating system and basic documents on the SSD; everything else - pictures, audio, movies and Devonthink databases - has been put on the hard drive to keep the 256GB SSD freed up.
I forced Spotlight to index the hard drive - but no Devonthink docs from the drive appear in Spotlight searches. A lot of DT docs appear in the searches, but they all sit on the SSD, in Home/Library/Caches/etc.
Can anyone explain what’s happening here? Devonthink itself appears to work quite happily with the databases on the second drive; why isn’t Spotlight seeing them?
Check your System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy settings to be sure you are not excluding locations that you want Spotlight to index. You might need to rebuild your DEVONthink databases’ Spotlight indices by clicking “Rebuild” in File > Database Properties > … for each of the databases that you want to index.
Thanks, Korm. The drive is definitely not in the Privacy setting.
Actually, Spotlight seems to be finding DT documents just fine. What confuses me is that when I look at Spotlight search results in Finder, the path bar shows the found DT docs to reside in ~/Library/Cache/Metadata/etc, but when I click on the found docs, they open in the DT database on the second drive.
So it’s working. I’m just not sure why it’s working.
Because you are not able to Spotlight index a DEVONthink database (or any other package for that matter).
When you tell DEVONthink to make a database visible to Spotlight it writes out these cache files with the appropriate metadata for Spotlight to index and see. This is why you get hits on your local drive. However, these are not the original files (something people often misunderstand) but are just pointers to the originals in the database. That’s why when you choose one, it opens up in DEVONthink as expected.