Getting Started : A Word About Backups

A Word About Backups

For many users, the value of the data is much greater than the value of the computer that hosts it. There are many things that could go wrong. Your notebook computer could be dropped, lost, or stolen. Your hard drive will fail (it's not a matter if, but when). A power outage could corrupt the files on your hard drive. For the truly paranoid (remember, paranoia is sometimes justified), how significant would the loss of your database be if your house or office were to burn down? Avoid insomnia and back up your database(s) frequently. Your data stored in DEVONthink is valuable, so back it up.

Internal Backups

DEVONthink backs up its database index every week, either immediately after opening the database (if the backup is overdue) or during the day when appropriate.

Note: The internal backups are mainly a troubleshooting mechanism for use in the application. Backing up your files, including your DEVONthink databases, is up to you.

Full Backups

We strongly recommend you get in the habit of triggering backups whenever you have invested substantial time and effort into modifying the database. Apple's Time Machine and an external drive is an easy way to do this. Simply connect the drive and let Time Machine do its thing. With the low cost of portable external drives, it's even feasible to take a 1 TB drive that can fit in a shirt pocket for backups when you're out and about. Online backups such as Arq Backup are an alternative if you don't want to own another piece of hardware to care about.

As a secondary backup option, you can create an optimized and compressed copy of the whole database that you can then save on a server or other media. Use File > Export > Database Archive or Scripts > Export > Daily Backup Archive to create a ZIP file of the database. The former option allows you to choose specific place; the latter creates it in a Backup folder in your home folder.

Lastly, as events such as house fires and natural disaster frequently prove, valuable data should probably be kept at more than one location. Consider saving a copy of your backed up information at a secure, off-site location such as a bank safe, or put the exported ZIP files of your database in your cloud account.

Note: As noted in our FAQ, sync is not a backup, neither advertised nor advocated as such. While database restoration may be possible with sync data, it is not meant to be relied upon or used in lieu of proper primary backups.