Understanding Database Sizes

If you look at the File > Database Properties for a DEVONthink database, the size of the content is shown, summed with all documents, including indexed ones. But when you look at the database file in the Finder, you’ll see the size doesn’t match. Let’s clear this up.

When you add items to your database, a host of related files are stored or changed inside the database package. These include metadata, generated thumbnails, and the searchable text from your documents. Even if you are using indexing — which doesn’t copy the file into the database — the searchable text still takes space. The more words and unique words in your documents, the more space is taken by the index. And more documents equal more text, metadata, thumbnails.

Once you’ve used the database for a week, it will grow more since an internal backup gets stored inside the internals. This backup retains a copy of the internal metadata, thumbnails, etc. And a week later, another internal backup will be made, again growing the database’s file size in the Finder. But don’t worry! DEVONthink won’t continue adding backups. It stores only two metadata backups, purging the older one to make room for the new one.

So there is more than your documents contributing to the file size in the Finder. Read more about using the internal metadata backups in the help and the downloadable documentation.

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