I have quite a few databases that have grown a little bit wild, and it’s time to re-organize them. That means moving chunks of data from one database to another to a new one. What is the best way to do this? I am asking because I had quite some trouble doing this.
I thought it would be simple by using the command “move”. So I moved a quite big chunk of data - a lot of groups - from one database to another and thought I was good. But it turned out that a lot of groups weren’t moved. And when such an action doesn’t work perfectly you get the question if all data in the groups has been moved or if did something disappear on the way. As this is vital data I decided to go back to a backup and start over. Instead, I decided to use the command “copy”, but even with this command, a lot of groups wasn’t copied. Then I tried to choose only these groups and do the “copy” again and experienced that these groups still wouldn’t copy. I tried drag and drop, whit the same result. What is going on here?
Is it better to export groups and then import them to the new database?
Any suggestions on what would be a safe way to move big chunks of data in DEVONthink?
Best regards, Per
Check Window > Log. What is reported there?
Nothing reported on the move or copy of data. But there are a lot of missing files. Is that a problem?
I would definitely not be moving inconsistent resources between databases, so I would suggest you clean it up beforehand. No sense moving problems between databases 
That seems reasonable, Jim.
But it doesn’t answer my question about why certain groups cannot be moved or even copied to another location. Or my question about best practices when moving big chunks of data around in Devonthink.
Any opinions on these two questions?
Groups not moving would initially seem to point to duplicate UUIDs, typically caused by emails.
Personally, I am not a fan of moving big chunks of data versus smaller batches of data.
Hold the Option key and choose Help > Report bug to start a support ticket and we’ll see if there’s anything useful in the logs.