Uh-oh...are all of my important files in the DTPO Trash?

DEVONthink Tips
1

I’ve been going through a tedious process of digital spring cleaning – organizing files for the past ten years on 18 external drives and three older computers. I was planning to bring all of the text/pdf/rtf/doc files into DTPO and then create an “external” Finder folder for the remaining elements and just sync that “external” folder in DTPO.

Well…I was just looking for a file I found in finder in DTPO to see if I had already ingested it, and I found that it was in DTPO, but listed as being in the trash. I thought that was odd, so I went into my main database and clicked on an important file and did a search for its name. Again, it is listed as being in Trash.

And in fact, the trash is listing that it has 2669 items!

I’m a bit nervous about what to do next. I certainly don’t want to empty the DTPO trash! how can I make sure to protect this all important stuff while it is still showing up in DTPO? Should I create a new database and drag the important stuff into the new database?

Thanks!
Matt

2

I don’t know what you did, but just in case you had inadvertently deleted all or a big chunk of your database in one action, see what happens if you choose Edit > Undo. The Delete command to send selected content to the database trash is reversible until the database has been closed.

If you can’t Undo a delete operation, click on the Trash icon in the left sidebar. You can see the database Trash for each of your open databases. The contents of each of these trashes can be selected and moved back into their database. You may or may not end up with your complete organizational structure, depending on what had been selected.

“Spring cleaning” is usually great, but it’s also one of the most dangerous actions you can undertake on a computer. If attention wanders for a moment, bad things can happen. :slight_smile: