Why-o-ever it may happen, databases can go corrupt. Be it a damaged file system, a system hang, or, Heaven forbid!, a DEVONthink crash. But, no reason to panic. First, run Tools > Verify & Repair. If DEVONthink cannot repair the database or if you are sure that you’ve lost some data, it’s time for the internal backups. By default, DEVONthink keeps two internal backups of the database index files that you can revert to at any time. (more)

Innowen from DIY Planner has published a nice review of DEVONthink Pro. She nicely describes how she uses DEVONthink but does also mention the downfalls for her. Here’s her conclusion:

That said, if you need an excellent all-in-one research assistant/personal information manager on your Macintosh system, then DEVONthink is the one for you. It’s fast, reliable, is able to index, cross-reference, search, handles almost all file formats natively and makes coffee for you in the morning (okay, it doesn’t… but DTPro could do that if it wanted to) … (more)

With Bookends 9.2 it’s now possible to create links from DEVONthink to an entry in Bookends. Simply drag an ID number of a reference into a rich text document. This creates a special URL that opens the corresponding Bookends reference when clicked. In addition, you can drag the ID into DEVONthink’s groups and documents list which the creates a link document for the reference. DEVONthink Pro Office 1.3.1, DEVONthink Pro 1.3.1, and DEVONthink Personal 1.9.9 add special support for this and name the link document automatically.

No Tuesday Tip, but a Wednesday Announcement. We’re proud to tell you that we’ve agreed with the German capture software manufacturer ExactScan to work closer together. Their ExactScan software allows you to connect one of the fast Avision scanners to your Mac and feed scanned documents directly into DEVONthink Pro Office. Just as we already did with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. Avision makes low-end to high-end auto-feeder scanners with scan speeds of up to 100 pages (50 sheets) per minute. So if you’re into serious paper capture, check them out.

A less well-known keyboard shortcut that works in nearly every Mac OS X application including DEVONthink is Alt-Tab. It switches forward through all panes of the frontmost window. In DEVONthink Pro’s Three Panes view, for example, from: groups to documents to the view/edit pane and back to groups.

If you want to create a link to a group or other document in a rich text document, you can either write something, select it, Control-click or right-click it, and choose ‘Link to’ from the contextual menu, including navigating through your groups hierarchy. Or, you can simply drag the item into the rich text document with the Option and Command keys pressed (like creating a replicant or an alias in the Finder.)

To archive a web page within DEVONthink, use the contextual menu. First, select the Link document in question to view the web page ‘live.’ Control-click or right-click the background of the page to show options that are affect the whole page, not a specific item on it. Now, choose ‘Capture Web Archive’ to save the current state of this page as a web archive (the HTML code including all images required to display it) directly into the database. Even if the web page changes over time, this captured web archive won’t. (more)

Lifehacker has posted a nice review, sort of, of DEVONthink with a good comments thread that also touches a few ways on how to use DEVONthink. Feel free to add your own comments :-)

One simple way to improve the Classify feature of DEVONthink is to exclude certain groups and documents from being used for classification. You could, e.g., exclude groups with indexed backup CDs or archived mailing lists from classification because they are ‘atypical’ for the contents of this database but you want to them in there anyway for easy access. To exclude an item from being used for classification, select it, open the Info panel (Tools > Show Info) and check ‘Exclude from classification.’

No Tuesday Tip today, but one, no!, two updates: We have just released the second public beta of DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office 1.3. DEVONthink Pro Office fixes a number of bug and adds a few requested features, and DEVONthink Pro 1.3b2 brings all the changes we have made to DEVONthink Pro in the recent weeks but have only published as part of DEVONthink Pro Office. (more)