Do files change on import?

I have been testing out EagleFiler for the past day or so, after hearing many great things about it.

As I have been importing files, I am finding that particular folders are considerably smaller (10-50%) when I import them into EF. I haven’t yet found missing files, but when I check file sizes in the Finder, I find it a bit disturbing to see when a 1GB folder only shows up in EF as 500 MB, etc.

And, after importing or capturing files, what do you all do with the original folder? The import system seems to duplicate the original folder within the library folder, but given the transcription issue, I am hesitant to eliminate the original folder.

The folder contents should be the same after importing, except that (a) the EagleFiler one will contain a metadata backup, and (b) EagleFiler will skip certain invisible items, such as .DS_Store (which holds Finder view information) and .FBCIndex (which holds the Find By Content index for older versions of Mac OS X). Please let me know if you find the source of the size differences.

I delete the original files after importing. If you want, you can import files by moving them into EagleFiler’s “To Import” folder; then it will delete them for you after importing.

I guess the size difference is related to the deletion of duplicate files on importing… By default (see Preferences) the checkbox for “Allow duplicate files in library” is unchecked…
I had 40Gb of photos and documents which were recovered from a formated HD, and their names were all messed up. After importing to EagleFiler the 40Gb folder was reduced to 11Gb…

Anyway, regarding the “delete duplicates on import” feature, I would like to know from Michael if this is really safe? Can I be absolutely sure that no files will be incorrectly identified as dupes and thus not be imported?

Oh. If EagleFiler skips a duplicate, it reports that in the Errors window and tells you which two files were the same. Since you didn’t mention any errors, I assumed there weren’t any.

The duplicates feature uses 128-bit MD5 checksums to determine which files are the same. This is safe so long as you haven’t deliberately constructed your files to collide with MD5. :slight_smile: EagleFiler only compares the data fork, so files with the same data but different resource forks and/or extended attributes will be considered the same file.