Sonny Software

Hi all, I have a poorly organized set of several thousand references that I mirror on 2 mac computers and 2 linux computers. I am just getting into the Mac world, and I'm hoping to organize things. If I move subdirectories around, or rename then, will Bookends keep track of them? It seems in this use case I might want to copy all attachments into the Bookends library (~/Documents/Bookends/Attachments). This would also help me make sure I am not losing any metadata that might be lost if a transfer files from linux to the mac, as I believe apple's file system allows for more metadata than linux (ext4).

For those of you that copy attachments into the Bookends default folder, rather than use a separate directory, is this similar to your motivation for doing so? I'm trying to understand the pros and cons of copying stuff to the bookends default attachments folder.

Thanks.

Others can give their perspectives, but know this:

1. Bookends only stores a files *name* in the database. It stores the *paths* to folders in which you have attachments in preferences. So you can move PDFs between folders that Bookends knows about as much as you want, and Bookends will always find them. A corollary is that all attachment names must be unique (which Bookends ensures).

2. The default folder (or subfolders) are particularly useful for a number of reasons. First of all, your PDFs are in one place so it's easy to pack them up and move them if you want. Second, some Bookends features (like Spotlight searches and Tag searches) only look for PDFs in the default folder hierarchy.

3. If you rename a PDF you should do it in Bookends (it has a rename function). Otherwise Bookends won't be able to find it because the name in the db won't match the name in the Finder.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks Jon.

So Bookends continually re-indexes the path to each file, as long as they aren't moved from the parent folder where Bookends looks for things, and as long as the file name isn't changed outside of Bookends?

It's not re-indexing (there is no index), it looks up the files on-the-fly. But basically, yes (and so you understand, if you move a PDF between folders that Bookends already knows contain attachments, the PDF will be found). I advise sticking with the default folder unless you have a good reason not to.

Jon
Sonny Software