Before we discuss this, do you know that your WhizFolder documents are separate files on your disk? If you understand this concept, please read this article. Otherwise, first read the concept, Where does WhizFolders keep my notes?.
When you create a new document, WhizFolders always asks you for a file name. It selects the location My Documents by default but there is no reason why you can’t change it. If you have not been paying attention, perhaps, all your documents are ending up in My Documents. While this is convenient to remember, it has its disadvantages as discussed in The pitfalls of using “My Documents” as the location of your documents.
Once you know this, you might want to move over all your documents to a new location. Here are some tips on moving them. Depending on your feedback, I want to make these tips better and can even think of introducing file operations in WhizFolders. Lately, I have come to realize that using Windows Explorer and the file system is not easy for many of you.
Tips for moving your documents:
Simple case: I am assuming a simple case where you have determined that all your documents are in My Documents and you want to move them.
- Make sure that WhizFolders is not running or does not have any documents open.
- Open My Documents in Windows Explorer
- Make sure that you are seeing the list in details mode (View–Details menu)
- Click on the column heading “Type” so that all WhizFolder documents appear together in the list.
- Select them all using standard Explorer methods.
- Right-click and Copy to clipboard. (don’t use Cut because in case of errors during copy, you don’t want to be in a state where some documents have moved and some have not. Using Copy ensures that the process is repeatable after some error)
- Go to the desired target folder in Explorer where you want to put the documents.
- Right-click in the folder contents (right-pane) and do a paste.
- A Windows Copy operation starts. If there are any errors (for example, if the document is open in WhizFolders or there is not enough disk space), correct the situation and try a paste again.
- Once you are sure that all the documents are copied properly, you can now update the WhizFolders main document list. Here are the steps.
- Start WhizFolders and click on the main window to see the list.
- Edit–Select all to select all the document names in the list. These are pointing to the old location.
- Right-click and do “Remove from List.” This merely removes the old location document name entries from the list.
- Right-click and do “Add an existing document.” A file open dialog comes up. Go to your new folder where you copied all your documents above. Select all those document names in the file open dialog and then click open.
- Your list is now updated to point to the new location. Open a few documents from the list to see that the new documents are opening correctly.
- Once you have updated and verified the main list as described above, you can now take a safe backup copy of your old documents in My Documents and then delete them.
Not so simple case:? What if your documents are scattered over several file system folders and you want to move them all to one place?
For this, Windows Search Files operation can be useful. Just start a Windows Search (Start–Search for Files and Folders), click on All Files and Folders, and enter *.wzfolder in the filename. Change the Look In box if necessary, then start the Search. It might take some time depending on how many disks it is searching.
Finally, you will get a complete list of your WhizFolder documents in the right-pane. After that the steps to copy are essentially the same as from Step 5 above.
Yet another method to copy: If you know and understand how Backup works in the new version, you can select all the documents in the main window list and do a backup to a fresh folder. This copies all the documents in one-shot. Then you can go and correct the names of the copied documents because the names have some date suffixes in them. We will give an option for a straight copy in some future version. However, note that this method will only copy the documents in your list. If your list is not complete, you still have to rely on Windows Search as described above.
