I am preparing for a big re-arrangment of my stuff, weed out some old and unused data, arrange things in topically organized databases etc. I admit that I 1) am paranoid about data loss and 2) have shot myself in my foot once or twice when I thought I was doing something particularly clever. So I’ll just ask for your opinion.
Most of the databases are indexed stuff (that precisely is something I am going to change), in other words, things that still exist in the Finder. I have a tally on what the most important replicants are in my database but other than that it should be perfectly safe to just delete the database, create a new one and import the Finder items.
BUT there might just be items hiding somewhere inside my database that I created inside it, which have no representation outside the database. These I would lose, something I am not particularly keen on.
The database is too big to go through manually, so what is the best strategy to retrieve those nuggets of information automatically?
Greg’s approach will work to identify documents within the database that were not Index-captured. One could then, for example, export them to the Finder so that they could be reincorporated into a new database into which all previously Index-captured content would be Imported.
But the problem is that any organizational structure that might have been used for the non-Indexed content will be lost.
A different approach would be to create a smart group based on the criterion Kind = Group, then expand all groups, then sort them (View > Sort) by Path. (Sort by Path often improves the ‘clustering’ of Indexed groups.) The assumption here is that the user hasn’t included non-indexed content within Indexed groups (I advise agains doing that). A second assumption is that either there are no unclassified documents at the root level, or one will do a similar job on those to separate Indexed from non-Indexed content.
Now we can scroll down and select all the Indexed or all the non-Indexed groups for export or for deletion, depending on the preponderance of those categories in the database. The Indexed groups will be identified by a curved arrow symbol. It’s easy to do multiple non-contiguous selection. The advantage of this approach is that any time and effort one has expended in organizing non-Indexed content will not be lost.
In my case, as I rarely Index content, it would be easier for me to identify the Indexed groups, delete them from the database and then Import the corresponding Finder files, to result in a self-contained database.
