Migrating from Yojimbo

While I’ve been a happy Yojimbo user for some years, I’m attracted to EagleFiler for several reasons including its use of multiple databases and the ease of importing messages from PowerMail. I have some 1100 or so records in Yojimbo and am looking for help on their transfer to EagleFiler. I have tried using the capture key on individual records, it works well with preservation of the original date. It’s not a practical route for some many records however. So I tried exporting a selected a block of records. That was fine in that EagleFiler imported them all without any noticeable format change. The downside however is that all the creation dates are those of the export from Yojimbo rather than their creation date. I’d appreciate ideas on how to automate the export all my Yojimbo records with their creation dates intact.

– Charles

Bulk capturing from Yojimbo should work just as well as capturing a single record. It’s the same code. I just tried a bulk capture, and EagleFiler preserved both the modification and creation dates. Are you sure that you were looking at the right columns in EagleFiler? The Date Added will show the date of the export/import, but the Date Created and Date Modified columns should match those columns in Yojimbo.

I guess that ‘bulk capture’ means highlighting a bunch of records in Yojimbo, right? I’ve now tried that and it’s fine, thanks for the tip. What doesn’t seem to work is importing files exported from Yojimbo. I imagine that the reason lies with the way the OS handles file creation and that Yojimbo doesn’t have a way of preserving the creation dates when it exports(?). If I’m right, this still leaves me with wanting to find a way to automate the export from Yojimbo. I can’t imagine that highlighting the full record set at one go will work. Is there a maximum that EagleFiler can take in before it gets indigestion?

Right—I thought that’s what you were doing before, but I guess you meant you were literally using Yojimbo’s Export command. I don’t recommend that.

Yojimbo chooses not to set the creation date when it exports. There are also other reasons to use EagleFiler’s capture: unlike exporting/importing it will preserve the tags, labels, and comments that you’ve set in Yojimbo.

There shouldn’t be any problem importing thousands of records at once. If you run into trouble, please let me know and/or try smaller batches.