Tags- Duplicating?

Hi All - I just made a second database and Indexed a folder of teaching materials I want to use DT3 to help me organize and categorize … I find DT great for this.

When I indexed these new items I now see 2 of the same tags - 1 in the newly indexed database and 1 in the already existing Database… Can I combine these or is there something to do?? Having 2 of the same tag makes me nervous :slight_smile:

The Screenshot below shows the tags. (MI and CaseStudy are dupes)

That’s how it should be as record A in database 1 and record A in database 2 are only one file in the file system.

You can set different values for e.g. Custom Meta Data for record A in database 1 and database 2 as Custom Meta Data is a feature of DEVONthink, but you can’t set different tags or e.g. different Finder comments for this indexed file.

Are you sure you understood how indexing works?

Maybe Not!!! These are 2 different files - one database is an index of a folder in Google Drive (yes, local sync so it is on my computer) and the other database is an index of a folder in Dropbox (Also local sync) - so not sure I understand …. Unless your are saying the “record” is the tag ?? Ive been indexing for years - but I guess I have a lot to still learn.

Do I need to treat these in a certain way ?

There isn’t one set of tags in DEVONthink. Each database has its own set of tags.

Ahh, got it. From this …

… and this …

… I thought that you already had indexed the folder in the old database and now also indexed the same folder in the new database.

Great. Thanks for the quick response … and on a Sunday :slight_smile: !!!

So - seeing duplicate tags is fine??? I just don’t want to big of a database so that’s why I have 2… I remember once seeing some guidelines about size and “Unique Words” - can you let me know if those guidelines still exist ??

Thanks again !

Yes, I see that. I wasn’t clear about Where :slight_smile: … Thanks for the help… I am always learning !

You’re welcome!

Yes, duplicates tags are acceptable as each database is a separate entitiy so they each have their own set of tags. However, if you select the tags group for the specific database, you will only see its tags. If you select the top-level Tags group, you will see a union of the tags of all open databases.

The guidelines aren’t hard and fast (and you’ll see different recommendations over the years as hardware and software has improved), but here’s my take on the comfortable limit:

On a modern machine with 8GB RAM, a comfortable top limit is 200,000,000 words and 4,000,000 unique words in a database. (Note: This does not scale in a linear way, so a machine with 16GB wouldn’t necessarily have a comfortable limit of 400,000,000 words / 8,000,000 unique words.)
Also, we suggest a comfortable maximum of 250,000 items in a database.