Moving PDF collections: Adobe Acrobat Organizer and MySQL
Moving to a new computer. The new C drive is a little crammed, so I moved all my PDF files, 4G of them, to D drive. I thought I copied all program perferences to the new user profile, including Adobe Acrobat’s Organizer preferences.
If you are like me, reading tons of PDF files for live, the Organizer (since 8.0?) can be a life saver. You can assign PDF files to categories, and it keeps track of all the files you read in the past week, month, year.
Except for one thing — all the file paths are hard-coded. Once you move your library to a different location, you loose all your "collections". Adobe simply can’t find them, and it makes no attempt to relocate them.
The files, under "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\8.0\organizer70", look awfully like MySQL files. So I gave it a shot. Copied the files to a LAMP server, made new a directory under "htdoc/mysql/data". Fired up PhpMyAdmin. Sure enough, it recognizes it right away like another MySQL databases.
How do I change the path names? Here’s a one liner example:
Search and Replace in MySQL database with phpMyAdmin
UPDATE `flexinode_data` SET textual_data replace textual_data, /audio/ , WHERE `field_id` 41
In my case:
Look under table "files", and do:
UPDATE `files` SET `file_diPath` = replace(`file_diPath`,"/C/Documents and Settings/username/My Documents/eLibrary","/D/eLibrary");
and
You should also edit the table "folders", but that can be easily done manually.UPDATE `files` SET `display_path` = replace(`display_path`,"C:\\Documents and Settings\\username\\My Documents\\eLibrary","D:\\eLibrary") ;
Now copy all the files back to your Adobe Acrobat Organizor folder (I made a backup first). Wola, back to business.