Help! All tags gone!!

[abstrakct]

Hi, and first of all thanks for the great tag2find!

OK, I'll try to explain my situation as detailed as I can:
I recently did something which perhaps was very stupid.
I have used t2f on my stationary computer to tag the movies I have on an external hard drive.
Recently I bought another external, and using my laptop (which doesn't have t2f installed) I moved
all the movies from the old external to the new one. Both drives are NTFS formatted. I thought
t2f would mind as long as I set the drive letter of the new drive to the same as the old one.
However, now, when I connect the drive to my stationary computer and open t2f, there are no tags whatsoever!

I've tried adding all files to an edit tab and check database, but it finds no tags.
Rerunning the configuration wizard didn't help either.

In my All users\Application data\tag2find\db directory, there's a lot files named
vol_#####.usn (###=numbers)
tfs_#####.db3
vol_#####.ddb2
vol_#####.ddb2-journal
etc.

Looking at those files with a program called notepad++ reveals that at least one of them contains a lot of the tags I'm missing, and a lot of the filenames... But t2f doesn't seem to recognize it. The file is named tfs_191726898.db3

How does t2f store things? By drive letter? Or by some sort of "volume id"?

So, is there any possibility of rescuing my tags?
Unfortunately I didn't export a backup of my tags before moving my files. I probably should've done that.

Thanks for any help, and thanks again for this great software, which is the best tagging program I've found and it suits my purposes perfectly!

Also, in my doc&settings\username\local settings\application data\tag2find there are these files:

tag2find.exe_StrongName_h2rhfnl5vtgt2fklwkxh5ulchxj1c0hl\0.10.2.5\user.config
tag2find_common (empty directory)
recentlytaggedfiles.db3

the recentlytaggedfiles.db3 file contains a lot of the filenames for which I am missing tags...

[martin]

First, save every tfs_*.* file you find. They are the ones that contain everything. Than you'll have to drag&drop all files you suspect to contain tags to the frontend, right-click "Verify database" for them, then they should be found.

For me it seems the service crashed, because you should hardly ever see a *-journal file, as they exist only during ongoing transactions. Please try restarting the service.

Best regards,
Martin

[abstrakct]

Hm..

I don't understand. I can't find any "verify database"...

But this is strange: Earlier today I used my laptop to add tags to some of the files on the external hd. When I later chose "check database for files", using the stationary computer, it finds the tags I've added using my laptop (!) - is that normal??? Does t2f store tags in the files themselves?

[abstrakct]

Hm, anyway, it seems the db file is corrupt or something. I found a program called SQLite database browser, and it finds no data in the tfs file which seems to hold my missing data... Opening other tfs files finds lots of data..

Any ideas?
Thanks!

[martin]

Hmm, actually I'll have to think about it, as I have never seen a SQLite db corrupting that badly as you describe.

What I meant actually was to add all the files that could be tagged to the main program and use the "check database for files".

And yes, tag2find stores tags as well on the database as on the files using a feature of NTFS called "Alternate Data Streams" in order to be able to recover in case of database corruption.

If you have your tags either on your laptop and/or on your computer, export the tags to XML to have another backup location you could recover from.

Best regards,
Martin