I was sent a new laptop for work and I followed the directions to "Backup and Restore" my configuration. Everything seemed like it went okay -- I was able to download and install DO on my new machine, and I was able to transfer my license over easily.
However, while my custom labels and statuses seemed to have moved over (they're listed in Preferences), none of them show up. I rely HEAVILY on these custom labels and statuses in order to do my job efficiently, but I've already uninstalled DO on my old machine since that was what I was told to do in order to move over my license, so I have no way of checking my old DO config files. Am I going to have to go through 7 years worth of work and redo all of my custom labels/statuses?! Is there anyway I can recover them? I've already tried exiting DO fully and then reopening it to no avail; as well as restarting my laptop.
Were these labels manually assigned to individual files/folders?
Those are normally stored in the filesystem (as part of the metadata for the files/folders themselves) and aren't part of your Opus config.
If you still have the old machine and the drive hasn't been wiped, it should be possible to transfer the labels over to the new one. The best method depends a bit on how many labels we're talking about, and whether something automated is needed (will probably require us to write a small tool to do it), or whether it's few enough that having a list will be enough to manually set the labels on the new machine.
On the other hand, if they're automatically assigned labels, based on criteria like file names/extensions, those should be carried over with the configuration.
(It's also possible to manually assign labels to a path within the Opus configuration, or for Opus to do that because the drive isn't NTFS and can't store the label in the filesystem. But labels assigned like that should still be in your Opus config file in that case, and would only stop working if the paths are not the same on both machines.)
Unfortunately, all of my labels were added manually -- I label mostly folders, but a few files are also labeled. I use them to keep track of the different graphic types I'm working on and their current status through our process, so they're all subjective and only I use them to keep myself organized. The most important labels I currently need restored are just the work I've done for this month (August), but I will eventually need to relabel all of my folders/files of all of my work since about 2020, before that my team was still on Macs so I wasn't using DO yet.
Fortunately, I do still have my old machine. I assume that the metadata is hidden information within the file/folder? Sorry, I'm computer savvy enough that I can sort of follow, but I went to school for art so please bear with me.
It could be that the paths are slightly different. I didn't actually set up my new machine, my work did and then they sent it to me. I believe my username on the old machine was "leckler", but on my new machine its "firstname.lastname", however the rest should still be the same.
Thanks for your help @gqqnbig, and for the link. I actually looked at that post too before posting my own. As far as I know, the label/status IDs are the same since I just backed up and restored my old DO config, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm the only one on my team that uses DO specifically for the labels/statuses so I can organize myself better, so technically there's only the one machine that they're being used on. Would they change when switched over to a new machine?
Thanks for the help @lxp. I do still have my original machine, but I've already uninstalled DO on it since I was told that I needed to uninstall it in order to install it on the new machine, but maybe they just meant the license part of my DO on my old machine? Would I still be able to access the "BackupMeta"?
Reinstalling Opus on the old machine temporarily is fine. It’s not a problem to have it in two machines at once for the purpose of transferring settings from one to the other.
In many cases, the Opus Pro license also entitles you to have Opus installed on both permanently, if you wish.
Oh that's good to know, I was sure my license was only for one machine so I wasn't sure how the new installation of DO would react to the same code being used on two different machines, so I uninstalled it just to be safe.
If I've already uninstalled DO on my old machine, does Windows remove all of the meta data and DO settings at that time, or are they still somewhere on my machine and reinstalling DO will find that information again?
That sounds great @lxp and @Leo! After I reinstall it on my old machine, how do I properly transfer it over to my new machine so that the labels/statuses transfer over as well?
If you want to use BackupMeta, all you need to do is run it once on the things whose metadata you want to extract. Then copy the resulting text file to the new machine, check the paths, and run the commands.
Sorry for the delayed response to this. A few things I have noticed since I last replied/some more information:
My "labels" replace the folder icon for that folder. I never use them for files.
My "statuses" are status icons (duh lol). I use them for both folders and files; and regularly have multiple per folder/file.
Yes, my file paths have changed slightly. It seems to just be a different username and the rest is the same, but it did break all of my favorites in DO so I had to relink them. This may be part of the problem.
For some reason my statuses (and one of my labels) show correctly for the new folders/files that I create, but not for the ones that were moved over from my old machine. We use OneDrive to move our files so I'm not sure if that also plays a part in this. The rest of the labels (that I've applied to new folders) show a blank file page icon instead of the custom icons that I created. All of my custom icons are kept in the same folder so they should work in theory. EDIT 2: I do think OneDrive is part of the problem -- I keep the folders/files for the tasks I work on during the current month in a folder on my desktop; which is then synced to my OneDrive. When the month is over, I move that folder of tasks to a server where all of my past work is saved. The folders/files on that server act like the new folders/files I create on my new machine -- meaning they display a blank file icon for almost all of the labels instead of the custom icons, but the status icons display correctly. It's only my current month task folder on my desktop (synced with OneDrive) that isn't displaying the labels from my old machine, broken or otherwise. In addition to this, the folder where the custom icons are saved is also located in my OneDrive.
@Leo I was able to reinstall DO with the config backup file on my old machine and all of my old labels are there. So worst case scenario, I can go through them and recreate the labels/statuses manually.
@lxp How do I use BackupMeta? When I go to Properties > Edit Metadata on a folder that has a label/status, it doesn't appear to have the label/status information in the metadata. Am I doing it wrong? Apologies in advance for my ineptitude, but I appreciate your help!
EDIT: I forgot to add a screenshot to better illustrate what I'm describing. The regular manila folder icons are folders that came from my old machine -- They should have custom icons as they do on my old machine, but as you can see they have no labels listed in the label column. The blank file icons with the status icons displaying are folders I created on my new machine -- As you can see, they do have labels listed in the label column, but only the "CodeCheck" and "NeedsReview" statuses are displaying correctly.
OneDrive won't sync NTFS metadata, so if the labels are stored in that they won't be synched to other machines.
(And if the labels are stored in the Opus config instead of NTFS metadata, they won't sync either, unless you manually copy the relevant config files over.)
Ah gotcha @Leo. Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like it's really only the current files from this month from before the machine switch that I need to re-label/re-status (since the ones on the server still show the labels/statuses, they're just not displaying correctly, which sounds like a separate issue maybe?).
