What does locking of a Folder/File do?

DEVONthink
1

What does locking of a Folder/File in DEVONthink do? I skimmed through the doco (and through the Take Control book), but I couldn’t find much explanation on it.

I know the Finder offers locking as well, but what does the mechanism in DEVONthink do?

Many thanks for any details!

2

It makes a record read only, i.e you can’t change the text. It doesn’t prevent moving, changing the label, tags, custom meta data etc.

3

Kind of. In fact, you can still open the record in an external app and modify it there. Which is not exactly what I’d call “read-only” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

To me, it seems more like a hint than a lock. Especially since modifying metadata is not blocked. I’d vote for a read-only setting on the file system level instead.

4

Like this? :wink:

5

Possibly. Though I’m not sure that this does really do what I mean. It seems that a locked file can still be moved around in the file system, which is not exactly “prevent changing”. OTOH, removing write-permission on the file system level would prevent this kind of change.
Edit: However, a file with only read-permission can be moved to another folder on the same disk. To prevent that, the enclosing folder would have to be read-only, too.

6

Thanks for all the info and details.

As a bottom line locking an item in DEVONthink seems to do the following:

  • It prevents DEVONthink itself from changing the content of the item.
  • DEVONthink can still change name, location and metadata of the item.
  • Other apps can still change the content (and all filesytem-level metadata) of the item.
7

And emptying the trash will show a special warning if the trash contains locked items.

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