Is there any way to back up tags in OS X 10.9 Mavericks?

Question

Level 1

10 points

Is there any way to back up tags in OS X 10.9 Mavericks?

So here is what I did. I partitioned my hard drive to run Mavericks to see if I liked it, along side Mountain Lion. Turns out I like Mavericks, but during my "test drive" I had made a bunch of tags that I would like to back up some way. Help!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3), 13" mid-2009

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 1:14 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

petvas

Level 2

284 points

Oct 24, 2013 1:16 PM in response to GioB50

You don't have to. Just backup your files. Look here for more info about Tags:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/8/#tags

Reply

Answer 2

GioB50 Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 24, 2013 1:20 PM in response to petvas

Thanks!

Reply

Answer 3

petvas

Level 2

284 points

Oct 24, 2013 1:21 PM in response to GioB50

copied from Ars Technica's review:

Tags

When a Tag that has a color assigned to it is applied to a file in Mavericks, Label information is written to the Finder Info field exactly as described above, making Tags at least partly backward-compatible with pre-Mavericks systems. As more colored Tags are added to the file in Mavericks, the Label information changes to reflect the most recently applied Tag. If a Tag does not have a color assigned to it, the Label information is not modified.

The actual Tag information is stored in its own separate extended attribute named

com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags

. (As far as I know, this is a "normal" extended attribute, not a proxy for legacy HFS+ metadata like

com.apple.FinderInfo

and

com.apple.ResourceFork

.) In this example, the "Green" and "Red" Tags have been applied to the file

Hello

in that order.

Reply