I’d appreciate a little help undoing something that I’ve done, which is quite stupid.
I had an enclosing folder named Newspapers, with multiple subfolders for a particular title broken into decades. There were 13 subfolders in all. All of the files within were indexed from an external hard drive. When tidying up the external hard drive, I moved the folder from which the database drew the indexed items. There were several thousand individual files in the database folders, so I naively thought I would try the Update Indexed Items command to see if it would update all file paths automatically.
It didn’t. In fact, it has removed them and all enclosing folders from the database. Not the result I was expecting. Nothing in the trash, it’s as though they never existed. Anything I can do to resolve this (I’m aware that I can re-index the items).
I have to say, given this description in the manual, I’m confused (and annoyed) by the command outcome:
Use Update Indexed Items to keep indexed groups and their originating folders in sync or to manually update an item that you have changed directly inside the database package when DEVONthink was not running.
You removed the items from their location so it is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Select the parent group in DEVONthink, and open the Generic Info inspector.
Click the dropdown arrow for Path and choose Select. Select the new path to update it.
Thanks for the reply @BLUEFROG. It was of course very easy for me to reindex the items in the database, and I’ve used the Inspector on the very rare occasion that I’ve needed to move another indexed item.
What I did above was experiment by moving the indexed parent folder within the same hard drive, and then triggered the Update Indexed Items command. It was unexpected (to me at least) for Devonthink to simply remove the folder from the database entirely, as if it were never there. I suppose at worst I expected a warning to say that the folder couldn’t be found - as is the case with indexed files when the external hard drive is not connected. Perhaps a warning to say that in this particular use case Devonthink will simply remove the indexed files and folders from the database, would be a good idea? And a line in the documentation to that effect, added to the Update Indexed Items command description, would be no harm.