There’s no published limit but here’s my treatise on database size…
Size in gigabytes isn’t the critical number. If you check out File > Database Properties > … for a given database, the number of words / unique words are more critical. 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.) So text content in a database is far more important.
- If you have a database of images, it will have very few words but be large in gigabytes.
- If you have a database of emails, it will have many words, but may be smaller in gigabytes.
The second one may perform more poorly as the number of words increases beyond the comfortable limit.
Also, for best performance we suggest a maximum of 250,000 items per database.
Smaller, more focused databases will generally perform better, Sync faster, and be more data-safe in the event of a catastrophe (avoiding the “all your eggs in one basket” problem) . They also give you the opportunity to close unused databases when you’re not using them. This frees up resources, not only for DEVONthink, but the rest of the system. There is no benefit to having a bunch of unused databases open all the time.
Note: This applies mostly to DEVONthink on the Mac, with the assumption people carry less data on mobile (especially due to hardware and resource limitations).
The one thing you’ll have to be aware of is there is a 10MB size limit on formatted notes, so if you have composed Evernote notes with many images / attachments they *may not be viewable in DEVONthink To Go. You can set up a smart group in DEVONthink to see if you have any running up against this limit…
