I’d nevertheless recommend persisting while you’re in the trial period. Leaving the Duplicates issue on one side for now, just treat it as an additional tool for searching among the files you’ve already indexed. Run a few searches that would be useful to you; select a file and check out the Documents pane of the See Also and Classify inspector; try out the Go => To Document and Go => To Group popovers with their shortcuts and as tear-offs.
If any of this looks as if it might be useful, do these three things (in your own time):
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Simply because DT is so massively feature-rich, the manual can be a bit overwhelming for first-time users; Joe Kissell’s Take Control of DEVONthink 3 is a newbie-friendly gateway that won’t trigger your manual-fatigue PTSD.
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Max out the trial period by quitting the app when not in use (to stretch the 150-hour quota). The trial version has the full feature set not just of the basic version but of the Pro and (very expensive) Server versions. If you decide to purchase before you’ve used up the 30 days or 150 hours, defer the purchase till the trial has expired, because once you’re on the paid version you’ll lose these features forever unless you subsequently decide you want them enough to pay for them.
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Decide which folders you actually need to search for things in and start over with a much more focussed indexing approach. As the DT team say, kitchen-sink indexing isn’t a good use of the app’s power; stick with folders that actually have documents in them. You might end up, for example, with a database into which you index your Desktop, Downloads, and Documents folders, and another for relevant directories on your Google drive, though this would probably still be overkill and starting small with a few core folders that have a lot of documents in them would give you more control and speed.
DT is a huge, life-changing app, and ideal for working with stuff like genealogical data. Most users go through a similar journey of starting with “Hmm, not sure I get this and I don’t think it’s for me”, to discovering a single killer use (likely searches on large collections of indexed documents), to gradually discovering more and more features that help with their workflow, to eventually noticing that it’s quietly become the core app for everything they do. There’s often a point in this journey when you kick yourself and go “Doh! I wish I’d checked out that Pro or Server feature during the trial period. Now I’ll just have to pay up and cross fingers it does what I’m hoping.” The good news is that usually by that point it’ll be more than worth paying up.