3.11 Catalog “cloned” disks
NeoFinder takes great care when it comes to identifying the disks you have cataloged, and it uses not only the name – which can and will be changed manually more than often – but also the volume size and the creation date.
But NeoFinder also uses an invisible file named .neofinder.abemeda.volinfo.xml at the root level of the disk to uniquely identify volumes.
This is a simple text file, so you can inspect it any time you want. It contains a unique string that NeoFinder can use to identify the disk or volume.
Now if you create an exact clone of such a disk, for backup or archiving purposes, maybe with tools like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, you want to make certain that this invisible file is NOT cloned, as that would greatly confuse NeoFinder, and likely cause it to use the wrong volumes.
So make sure that in these cases, the file is deleted after the clone operation, or you exclude it from cloning.
If you do not wish to have NeoFinder create such files for safe identification, open Terminal.app, and enter the following line:
defaults write de.wfs-apps.neofinder noDeviceIDFile YES
That will cause NeoFinder to ignore these files and to never create them.
If you use ChronoSync, you can exclude the special hidden file in the “Analyze" section of the setup. (Thank you Christopher Campbell and the ChronoSync support for the information and the screenshot!)
