Advantage of saved versus linked documents

[rbahra]

I'm trialling UR and am impressed with it so far and can see how it would be very good when used for archiving my many files of information. However, I don't like the idea of storing many hundreds of documents (pdfs, html, .rtf etc) in UR and risk losing them all if the database developed a corruption (is this possible?)

Therefore, rather than store documents inside UR, I would keep them in directories and link to them in UR. Thus, my doucments are always safe. Are there any disadvantages in this approach? In other words, is there any major functionality that you can do with stored documents that you can't with linked documents? Searching seems to be fine as simple tests in UR showed that I could see search in linked or stored documents, which is great!

[kevina]

By not storing the files in the .urd file you lose the automatic compression and ability to encrypt the actual files, but as you noticed, all indexing, keywording and linkage works the same whether stored or linked.

If the linked files are actually located relative to the .urd file (like a subfolder where the .urd file is), then the url for each linked item can be relative - which will make moving the .urd and related data much easier in the future... Just FYI.

[rbahra]

Thanks for the information. The use of relative paths sounds useful.

UR's ability to compress data is a good reason for storing data in UR. I've spent some more time looking at UR and have realised that the UR's Export function could be used to create a backup of the stored documents in a UR database. In fact, the only thing missing is a sort of sync option on the Export function (a bit similar to that in the Import function) that would only export documents that were not already in the output directory or were more more up to date. Maybe a sync option for Export could be one for a future version of UR?

[kevina]

Sync functionality as you describe is currently in development.

[rbahra]

Great, I look forward to it!

In the limited time I've been trialling UR, I've liked it a lot. As a long time ECCO user, I've been looking for a long now for something that had similar cross-reference (or logical linking) functionality in a multi-document database. I've struggled with AskSam because of limited linking ability and the poor pdf document import (it loses the format as it converts into rtf). I think that in UR. I may finally have found what I need. Thanks!