Quote:
Originally Posted by glenellynboy
Did my backup job backup all my notes--all those bare little text windows? Will Mint have notes and accept the backup's note content?
If I can't back them up straight I'm planning to take the most important ones and load them into writer files.
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That is what is worrying me a bit. It will more than likely be backed up but the format is another question. The same applies to writer files, spreadsheets, contacts etc.
We can try to determine what is what.
How do you save notes? Using a filename? If so, you can use the
find command to locate it/them and the
file command to determine the type of content. I've created a fake note (as I don't have the notes application) and saved it as somenote.note
Code:
wim@aa0:~$ find . -iname "somenote*"
./documents/somenote.note
wim@aa0:~$ file ./documents/somenote.note
./documents/somenote.note: ASCII text
wim@aa0:~$
I only use a part of the filename to look for the file. Once you know where the file is, you can pass it as the argument to the file command.
If it says that it is an 'ASCII text', you're absolutely safe as it can be opened with any editor. If it says something else, let us know and we can try to determine the next step.
The above approach works for any file that you save under a filename (e.g. writer files, spreadsheets etc).
If you don't save them under a filename (this is, the notes application saves it somewhere or you forgot the filename), you can use the
grep command and the
file command.
Open an existing note so you know part of the contents (let's say that the note contains the words
my note). Open a terminal and use the
grep command as show below. For this exercise, I faked two other files and I removed the 'somenote.note'.
Code:
wim@aa0:~$ grep -ir "my note" *
documents/somenote.txt:this is my note
Binary file mybinaryfile matches
wim@aa0:~$
Note that this command can take a while to run (took a few minutes on my aspire one because it also 'scans' an iso that I have.
The command
grep does the search.
-i indicates that we don't care about uppercase and lowercase.
-r (as part of -ir) makes it go through all files and directories (recursive). Between double quotes is the search term (if you have spaces in the search term, you need the double quotes); don't try to search for 'fancy' characters like the dot, caret, square and round brackets, single and double quotes etc; it might affect the results or throw errors; those 'fancy' characters are always a trial-and-error exercise for me.
Once you have found the note, you can again determine what it is by using the
file command.
In this example the (faked) note is found in the documents directory in a file called somenote.txt; it was also found in a binary file in the home directory.
Your result will differ and will hopefully only return one result.
Code:
wim@aa0:~$ file documents/somenote.txt
documents/somenote.txt: ASCII text
wim@aa0:~$
Code:
wim@aa0:~$ file mybinaryfile
mybinaryfile: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'zenlive ' (bootable)
wim@aa0:~$
In the latter case (if it is not ASCII text) it depends on the output; let us know so we might be able to advise.
PS
Can you let us know which applications your using? Do you sue an email client or web-based email?
Also I'm not sure what type of files are created on your system if you use e.g. writer; it might be openoffice files but you can use find and file as shown earlier to determine and let us know what the results are.
