Hi,
I remember seeing your comment about databases last fall, and when I saw it again today I thought I'd ask, What do you have against database storage? The important thing is tht you be able to get your information out of the database, right? Not the fact that it's using a database... I'd be interested in hearing why you specifically look for apps that don't use a database. Just a quick FYI about DevonThink... it uses a database for the metadata and relationships describing your information, and it can store documents in the database, but you have the choice to ask Devon to leave your documents on the file system and just put pointers to them in the database... sort of like you do with iTunes. Also, regardless of whether you use the database for storage or not, DevonThink lets you export your content to files and directories when you need to.
Regards,
Leland
For a day to day use, I don't mind if data is in a database, as long as I can easily synchronize the data between two computers and I can easily backup the data.
About the former, I've read in many places that DevonThink was not great for automatic synchronization. There seem to be third party tools that try to do it, but I was not very confident. (Yojimbo with its .Mac integration fares better in this regard.)
About backups, at the time I wrote there was no automatic way to get data out of Yojimbo. The recent scripting additions to Yojimbo may have change things, but I switched before they happen.
Finally, there is the long term approach: I'm more confident in being able to read my data in a while if it's stored in an application independent format (i.e. the file system in this case) than in a database. Moreover, using a file system makes synchronization using a file synchronizer possible, which I find is a plus.
One feature I dislike about iTunes is that there is much metadata stored in its database and not in the song files themselves. I asked the EagleFiler developer to have a way to export the EF metadata to a friendly format, and he might look into it. This way, any additional metadata would remain available after EF is gone.
Commenting by HaloScan
