When you lose all metadata after copying replays...

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Arthur Spooner, Aug 14, 2015.

  1. Arthur Spooner

    Arthur Spooner Well-Known Member

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    Hi,

    I always had a strange issue with replays which I couldn't elaborate on at first. But recently I found out the reason and wanted to let you know, just in case anybody else had the same problem.

    Think of the following situation: I have a gaming rig at home but I have to work quite far away from there, so during the workdays I stay in a hotel. Sometimes I like to take the RRRE replays on my laptop with me just to have a look at them from time to time. To do so I usually copied the replays over my NAS to my laptop. When copying the replays to the NAS I always got a message if I really wanted to copy the files without all settings. At that time I had no idea what that meant. I didn't know what settings Windows was talking about and the replays were intact after copying them to my laptop - except one thing: all metadata was gone. It was no problem to play the replays but apart from the name, which is only partly visible in the list, there was no way to find out what the hell a specific replay is about. There were only grey tiles instead of thumbnails and when I klicked on them there was no metadata in the lower right corner of the screen shown.

    I suspected that this had something to do with the message Windows gave me about the loss of settings when copying the files to the NAS, but I had no idea what settings are supposed to be connected to a file that I could not see anywhere apart from the media hub of RRRE.

    And now I found out: it's the so called "Alternate Data Streams" (ADS).

    Before recently I didn't even know that something like this existed. Thus my astonishment about what was going on.

    An ADS is basically a "special" file that is not visible in the file manager and which is associated to a "normal" file as some kind of appendix. And it can contain anything a normal file can contain. It can be a simple text, an image, a video or even an executable. An ADS can be appended not only to a file but also to a directory. If you have an ADS to the file "C:\file.txt" called "ads.dat" the path to access the ADS is "C:\file.txt:ads.dat".

    If you want to see the ADS in your replay folder you have to navigate to that folder using the command prompt and type "dir /r" (without the quotes).

    And finally the reason why I had this problem when copying replays was that I used my NAS, which does not use NTFS, as a temporary storage. Other filesystems cannot hold ADS from NTFS and these are the settings Windows warned me to lose when I copy the files. When I copy the replays with my external HDD with NTFS the ADS are not lost and all replays keep their metadata because Windows incorporates the ADS when you copy a file between NTFS volumes.

    Maybe my special case with my laptop is not really a usual one, but most people have to reinstall their Windows from time to time, especially nowadays when switching from whatever to Windows 10. So if you chose to do a clean install of Windows 10, be sure to save your replays on another NTFS drive and not some non-Windows NAS.

    I have no Idea why S3S used this odd method to store the metadata instead of just keeping it in the file header or something like this.
     
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    Last edited: Aug 14, 2015
  2. Skybird

    Skybird Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for the indepth explanation!