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Old 06-22-2005, 02:29 PM
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sjk sjk is offline
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Eugene
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Originally Posted by dnanian
I brought this particular issue up numerous times in various sessions throughout WWDC, in the context of backing things up AND copying.
Your attention and interest about it is appreciated.

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Because, the fact is, these non-importer related metadata items are not backed up, and don't follow the file when copied.
True.

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So, it's hardly just reindexing. It's pretty much everything. Including backing up.
Yep.

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Spotlight has a lot of good things in it, but it doesn't have a lot of good data management issues for cases like this.
Even with bugs and limitations I've made it useful.

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(Fortunately, virtually everything in the database comes in through the importer -- everything but kMDItemWhereFrom -- and that is duplicated in the Spotlight comment, which *is* backed up.)
Hmm, I've never seen kMDItemWhereFroms duplicated to kMDItemFinderComment. In fact, I've been tinkering with the idea of automatically setting kMDItemFinderComment using the output of "mdls -name kMDItemWhereFroms file | cut -s -d '"' -f2 | head -n 1" since I lost the equivalent functionality by ditching the Saft plugin for Safari when upgrading to Tiger. Or maybe not, since I have on a slightly more ambitious project in mind.

I'm relieved if indeed only kMDItemWhereFroms is missing after copying or reindexing, assuming nothing's modifying other metadata. Some third party Spotlight+Automator project tagging stuff is using kMDItemFinderComment, which seems the only hook right now for users to "arbitrarily" extend Spotlight.

Thanks for the followup to this slightly off-topic topic. Hopefully it gets easier finding more accurate and detailed information about Spotlight as some of the misinformation hype settles down.
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