Backing up user descriptions

Help & Support
1

I have hundreds of user descriptions of many music files which I use to perform special sorts.

It took many hours to set this up and I am nervous of losing them.

Is there a way to back them up in case of a disk error or re-install?

Thanks
Jack

2

Depending on configuration, they are either stored in the filesystem metadata for each file (NTFS Alternate Data Streams) or in "descript.ion" files in the same directories as the files.

Backing up the NTFS ADS data will depend on the tool you are using the back up the files themselves. It may already be doing it, or it may need additional settings to make it to it, or may not be able to do it at all. Many backup tools can do it, but the exact steps needed (if any) will depend on the tool.

Backing up the "descript.ion" files is just a case of backing up the files as normal. (They have the H attribute set so may not show up, depending on filtering.)

3

I was also thinking about it recently, it should be possible to make a script-button which would recursively read* the user-descriptions and create a zipped backup file with descript.ion files. It would also be able to restore descriptions from such zipped backup (i.e., reapply from descript.ion to NTFS ADS of files).

Also a user-rating could be backed up in similar way.

* this should be achievable via Item.metadata.other.usercomment (I didn't try it yet)

4

Thanks for the responses.
I have a NTFS config and use Genie Backup Manager. It has a preference setting to preserve ADS which should do the trick. Implementing a script button is probably beyond my skills.

J