Set label on copy/move

Help & Support
1

I use the label colors a lot and just moved dozens of folders to another drive.
Unfortunately, all my label colors are gone on the target drive. This is years of work lost :frowning:

Is there any way to get those label colors back on the files and dirs? It would be very useful if the copy and move command set the label color automatically to the source.

2

It does, but the target drive needs to support it.

image
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This sucks! I remember my frustration after losing just a few metadata entries this way.

Maybe Opus could display a warning message when this is about to happen.

3

Labels will be copied as long as:

  • They are stored in the filesystem (not stored in the Opus configuration file against the filepath itself, or auto-assigned based on wildcards etc.)
  • Preferences / File Operations / Copy Attributes / Copy metadata (comments, keywords, etc) is turned on
  • And the target drive is able to store them (which generally means it must be NTFS).

Note that Cloud Storage and archive formats typically will not preserve labels, as they tend to ignore NTFS ADS metadata. Some NAS are unable to store them as well.

4

Well, I copied from NAS (where it works) to an external SSD (exFAT) which also allows me to set the label colors.

I've no idea why this is just 'lost' and no way to retrieve this back. This is very annoying :frowning: .

5

exFAT does not support NTFS ADS, so there's no way to store a label in the filesystem on the destination drive there.

You can still set labels for files on that drive, but the labels end up stored inside your Opus configuration instead, and point to the file path. They aren't part of the file itself. If the file is then renamed or deleted, that type of label continues to existing inside your config file and points to the old name (waiting for a new file to take its place, potentially).

6

I didn't know these details. I moved 300GB of files and folders. No way to get that straightened out.

I wonder if you could create a sidecar file per folder for metadata like this in the future. It's such a handy thing to color files and folders, specially when dealing with hundreds of megabytes.

7

Don't give up too quickly. Have a look at

/dopusdata\ConfigFiles\foldercolors.oxc

Maybe all you have to do is a bit of search&replace for the <pathstring> elements.

ExifTool can do this (backup&restore):

https://exiftool.org/metafiles.html

8

No data for these folders in foldercolors.oxc, the source drive contained the colors I guess. Thx for the tip though.

About exiftool, that's for images probably? My files and folders aren't images in this case.

I have to find another way to preserve these colors across drives.