I switched to Pop!_OS earlier this year from Manjaro KDE. One feature that KDE had is that you could write a comment on any file by clicking Properties and going to the metadata. I assumed that this wrote the comment into the metadata of every file and that this would translate over to other distributions, but it doesn’t appear to be the case.

I found this old thread from 2012 which said that KDE stores it’s comments in ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/. If that’s still true today, I’m really worried now that all of that comment data I spent hours writing has been deleted along with Manjaro, because I had no idea that the data wasn’t store inside the file itself, since it was always listed with the rest of the metadata for every file in it’s properties. Is there no hope of me getting these comments back, or is there some way?

Update: Despite what that old thread seemed to imply, it turns out the comments do in fact get stored in metadata. After getting help in the comments, I found the easiest solution was to simply install Dolphin (KDE’s file manager) into Pop!_OS, which allowed me to view the comments just as they were when I used KDE. For future readers, some other options that I didn’t try that probably also work are:

  • Load a Linux distro using KDE into a virtual machine on top of Pop!_OS and view comments that way
  • Flash a distro like KDE Neon onto a live USB and view the comments that way
  • Use the command getfattr FILENAME -n user.xdg.comment to view the comment data within the Pop! terminal (I didn’t get this working, but this was suggested to me)
  • DreitonLullabyOPEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    Thanks so much for all the suggestions. I couldn’t figure out how to use the command because it was giving me errors (which is probably just something I did wrong). But I’ll try to figure that out for the sake of learning.

    What did work for me, was downloading Dolphin (it looks so messes up in Cosmic though, lol) and the comments are absolutely there, thank God! So now I can recover them and I think I’m going to try to find an alternative solution for making these records that works easily across distros (because I don’t plan to stick with Pop! forever)