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Comment by _zzaw | Hacker News Reader

There was a point where I had most of my work and ideas in Devonthink. Then I noticed that a few important files had somehow vanished. I don’t know for sure if this was due to the software, but it unnerved me, and I moved to Obsidian.

I used DT primarily as a knowledgebase/notes app; I never found its smart features to be particularly useful. Nowadays, I’d definitely recommend Notion over DT.

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I had a similar experience. Used Devonthink for about 10 months and suddenly some files disappeared. Asked for a refund and they said “sorry, no”.

Were you keeping your databases on Dropbox? It crossed my mind that maybe that was related, although I only ever viewed/edited them on one machine.

I had something similar happen in Logseq when I stored my main directory in Sync, which is similar to Dropbox. After moving my main directory out of Sync, everything became stable again. Perhaps Dropbox was the root cause of the problem.

The problem could be the way you used the directory. I don't know Sync specifically, but DEVONtech don't recommend storing the databases in directories which will be synced. Rather you are supposed to set up the system to use whatever sync API is available, which presumably makes sure files are internally self-consistent before syncing. It's a while since I set it up, but that's how I did it with WebDAV to my NextCloud server.

I lost four to five years worth of data, the database just vanished. The backups I had were useless (some sort of systemic corruption?). Having been badly burnt, I can’t go back, but I’ve yet to find a tools that matches my workflow as well as DT does. Bummer.

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