There are lot of files that belong to multiple categories
e.g. A photo may be assigned to a Person as also to a Location or Vacation. A book may belong to Technology as also to Microsoft Office. An article may belong to multiple categories say Investing and Recession and so forth.
When we organize files in folders and subfolders, they can be categorized only to one of the categories or subcategories.
If I can assign something like Tags used in some software programs, I can assign multiple Tags to same file and still find it easily while having a single copy of file.
I have two questions.
Does Windows 10 or previous versions have anything in built for handling above. The only reason I am asking this is in case we have to move or copy files to USB drives or open them on machines which do not have Directory Opus installed or have available, this Windows feature can still be useful feature.
I am sure Directory Opus must be having something for sure to handling above with many additional features and I will like to know about it. I will also like to know about if it builds on top of any Windows feature if available or is it purely a Directory Opus feature.
You can use hardlinks or softlinks to put the same file in multiple folders. The drive needs to be NTFS for that to work.
Opus also lets you add tags and labels to files, but those also work best on NTFS (since it provides Alternative Data Streams to store them next go the file).
Most file systems are NTFS these days at least on Windows. However, on smaller USB drives etc. by default, either FAT32 or some other legacy file system might be available.
In case the Directory Opus setting Copy Metadata along with Copy all NTFS data streams is checked, does it copy all the Directory Opus tags, labels, descriptions along with the common file attributes? This way irrespective of whether Directory Opus is available on target machine or not, as long as NTFS file system is available, the metadata will be available and can be used in future through Directory Opus or some other means.
What is the advantage of using the Directory Opus descript.ion system instead of using the File Explorer metadata description?
What according to you is best way to have a file being able to be located using tags quickly. e.g. I may want to find an eBook in English which is Non-Fiction and if I can assign tags like eBook, English, Non-Fiction, I can find these way I can find all eBook that are in English.
The above can be extended to other media like Music, Audio, Video, Images etc. As this is a totally different way of finding or managing files, if you are aware of some script or even a different software which can complement Directory Opus for this, you can mention that too.
As long as the destination is also NTFS, it should copy everything, yes.
Note that some programs, when editing files, will delete the current file and replace is with a completely new file when you save a change. That can lose the metadata, depending on how the program does things. (If they use the proper ReplaceFile API that is part of Windows, the metadata will be preserved, but not all programs use it.)
The descript.ion system isn't an Opus thing. It's a very old standard, dating back to the MS-DOS days. You'd normally only use it if you wanted compatibility with some other software that also uses it, or to store descriptions for files on non-NTFS drives.
You can use Tools > Find Files > Advanced for that, if they are tags that Opus understands.