Sorry if this is a FAQ, I did search the forum first…
I have a lot of data and not a lot of storage space on my local hard drive, so my DTPO database resides on a network drive (a Drobo). I have no need for multiple users so that’s never been a concern, and the performance hit was minor for a several years. I generally add files to the global inbox on local storage, then move & organize them into the database on the network drive from there.
Unfortunately, the performance hit has grown over time to where it’s completely unacceptable - I have to find a new solution.
I was hoping DT Sync would solve this problem - but as far as I can tell, it requires the full database to exist on each machine that uses it. If it’s 75GB of data on the network, it’ll use 75GB of data on the local hard drive.
If that’s correct, Sync won’t help me any. What I really want is for the data files to exist only on the network, while the metadata (or a copy of it) exists on the hard drive.
I think I could do that by organizing the data files manually on the network drive, then telling a local DT db to index them - but if I’m organizing them myself that defeats much of the purpose of using DTPO in the first place.
You have a single 75 GB database? That might be the root of the problem. That’s rather large, even if it was local on the same machine as DEVONthink. Can’t you split the database into multiple databases?
It depends. On the one hand, If you are going to frequently rearrange the contents of most folders, then indexing becomes difficult. On the other hand, if you have a significant subset of your data whose folder hierarchies rarely change, then indexing that part is not so difficult. You’d need to step back and look at your data and decide.
I have two databases, one 56GB and one 20GB. I could split them up further, since DT can search multiple dbs. How small does DTPO need them for peak performance?
For me a big part of DT’s purpose is to relieve me of messing with where the physical files reside most of the time - finding the folder to drag a file to, making sure there aren’t too many files in a particular directory before the OS starts getting unhappy, etc. With DT, I just add it to the db, apply tags or groups, and DT handles the rest. With indexing, would I end up spending more time in Finder than DT?
Ok I exported part of my bigger database, created a new db on the local hard drive, and had it index the export folder. That seems to work fine, except that the indexed files no longer show up in Spotlight.
The database has “Create Spotlight Index” turned on, so I’m guessing that DTPO assumes that indexed items will be found by Spotlight and excludes them from the created index. However, Spotlight doesn’t index network drives (for good reasons).
Is there a way to get DTPO to include indexed items in the Create Spotlight Index process, or should I just give up on the idea of indexing?