Although I don’t use EDT every day, it’s always worth having available.
Today I had a glitch with an SSD which left a lockfile for a Devonthink database, a symptom of perhaps larger problems from the filesystem crash.
Verifying Devonthink file checksums indicated all was well, but I’m a weasely, nervous sort of person. I wanted to do a file-by-file compare with an old version.
No problem, I thought. I exported a JSON file of metadata from the Devonthink database in question. Then I opened a backup of the same database (note to self, do not allow sync when you open old versions of a DT database) and exported its metadata.
Holy cow - the old version had 3.1k rows in the JSON, the current version had a mere 1.8K!
Quick, run widdershins and weep for redemption. Or, fire up EDT.
In reality, the old version had about 1300 files listed in a “smart group” causing them to appear twice in my JSON output, inflating the file count.
I had deleted the smart group without deleting the files the smart group aggregated.
A quick EDT lookup transformation showed there were files missing from the older backup. The difference between the two Devonthink databases was about 40 new documents I had added since the backup.
In other words, from two small mountains of files to assurance nothing was wrong, about three minutes.
Confirmation of no data loss was worth quite a bit. I didn’t need the new graphing features for this, but it’s worth it to stay up to date. I figure today’s peace of mind puts me well on my way to justifying the upgrade cost.