Watched folders, and the state of each one

A watched folder is a folder on your disk that a vault follows continuously. Mnemosyne ingests what is there, then reacts to changes: a modified file is reindexed, a new file enters memory. That mechanism is called DocWatch.

You declare a folder from the vault window, with "Add a folder to watch". A vault can have several, and a vault with no watched folder at all is perfectly normal: it will fill some other way.

Seeing what is actually watched

"Watched folders" opens the live state of every declared folder, vault by vault. It is the first screen to look at when a file is not showing up in answers, because it separates situations that nothing else separates.

A folder can read "Watched", meaning a watcher is attached and following changes. It can read "Path not found", which happens after a move, a rename, or an external drive being unplugged: the folder is still declared but there is nothing at that address any more.

The screen can also say the DocWatch engine is not running. In that case no watching is active at all, whatever the folders themselves appear to say, and that is what to fix first.

Finally the screen can be empty: no vault has a watched folder. Nothing is broken, nothing was declared.

Why a file does not enter

A watched folder does not ingest everything inside it. Files are skipped because their type cannot be read, because they are too large, or because they belong to tooling directories that should not be in memory.

A file already ingested whose content has not changed is not reopened: its fingerprint decides, not its date. That is why turning on a new ingestion option does not immediately catch up on documents already in memory.