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10.4: Use Automator to batch add Spotlight comments
Authored by: davidduff on May 17, '05 12:39:26PM

how are spotlight comments stored? are they stored in a separate "fork" of the file? if so, is the information preserved when files are copied/moved?

i seem to remember that some backup utilities (retrospect is the one i am particularly interested in) don't preserve this kind of info yet. can anyone confirm? i presume it won't be too hard for them to fix this problem.

seems like it would be a shame if people spend lots of time creating and updating metadata only to find that it's wiped out later.

i seem to remember something like this happening before with finder "get info" comments. most people i know who used these learned not to rely on them for anything important.



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10.4: Use Automator to batch add Spotlight comments
Authored by: luhmann on May 17, '05 02:34:31PM

I was wondering the same thing. I saw this:

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2005/05/12#1301

which seems to suggest that it will all be lost if you swap hard drives or restore from a backup, etc.



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10.4: Use Automator to batch add Spotlight comments
Authored by: Tom Robinson on May 17, '05 07:45:08PM

Spotlight comments seem to be the old Get Info comments renamed and the same under the covers: i.e Retrospect and StuffIt don't save them, and the Finder loses them on a fairly regular basis.

They're stored somewhere external to the file, not the resource fork, hence their transient nature (under OS 9 it was somewhere in the file metadata, OS X it's in the .DS_Store files).

Pity. I've always liked them but they never stick around.

Where possible I now store comments in the files themselves (IPTC data for photos, document properties for NeoOffice/J), or in small text files.



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All Metadata is saved with the file (in forks)
Authored by: PopMcGee on Jun 13, '05 12:23:02PM

All metadata is saved as part of the file and automatically copied along on HFS+ volumes. Only when using strange filesystems like FAT (MS-DOS), ._ files are created. Unless your backup utility uses nonstandard ways of copying things, all your metadata should be kept intact.

Read more about this here:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/7



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