I switched to Pop!_OS earlier this year from Manjaro KDE. One feature that KDE had is that you could write a comment on any file by clicking Properties and going to the metadata. I assumed that this wrote the comment into the metadata of every file and that this would translate over to other distributions, but it doesn’t appear to be the case.
I found this old thread from 2012 which said that KDE stores it’s comments in ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/. If that’s still true today, I’m really worried now that all of that comment data I spent hours writing has been deleted along with Manjaro, because I had no idea that the data wasn’t store inside the file itself, since it was always listed with the rest of the metadata for every file in it’s properties. Is there no hope of me getting these comments back, or is there some way?
Update: Despite what that old thread seemed to imply, it turns out the comments do in fact get stored in metadata. After getting help in the comments, I found the easiest solution was to simply install Dolphin (KDE’s file manager) into Pop!_OS, which allowed me to view the comments just as they were when I used KDE. For future readers, some other options that I didn’t try that probably also work are:
- Load a Linux distro using KDE into a virtual machine on top of Pop!_OS and view comments that way
- Flash a distro like KDE Neon onto a live USB and view the comments that way
- Use the command
getfattr FILENAME -n user.xdg.commentto view the comment data within the Pop! terminal (I didn’t get this working, but this was suggested to me)
It sounds like you move those files directly from Linux FS to Linux FS, so they should be preserved (might not be if copied).
But I think if those comments are important, you should still have them stored in some markdown file next to them to avoid losing them if you move them accidentally to a Filesystem that doesn’t support Extended file attributes or the “tool” that you are going to use instead of attributes goes away.
Yeah, I did have that problem in the past with the comment data being demolished if I transferred the files with said comments onto my NTFS formatted external hard drive, though strangely, I’m still able to manually write a new comment on those files after the transfer.
In other words, what I find is that transferring a file with a comment from one ext4 drive to another ext4 drive retains the comment data, but transferring it from one ext4 drive to an NTFS drive deletes it, though it still allows me to rewrite a replacement comment regardless.
I’ve solved my issue by installing Dolphin, which allows me to see the comments now, and updated my post.