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
3 replies

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.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

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

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.