Technical

Mindburn Data

A drawback with many software applications is that they use proprietary file formats for your data making it difficult to interoperate with other applications and locking you into a particular vendor. Mindburn data is stored in open data formats: the notes themselves are familiar rich text files (.rtf) as used in Apple's TextEdit application. The meta data - holding schedule and other sundry information - is stored in an SQLight (version 3.0) database.

Files & Data

To make the operation of Mindburn as easy as possible explicit opening and saving to disk of data is not required. Saves are made automatically on the occurence of certain events during program use. There are times however when users might wish to deal with Mindburn data directly - backing up for instance. To simplify data handling all Mindburn data is stored in a single directory, its default location is "~/Documents/Mindburn/Notebooks/", this may be changed in the advanced preferences panel. The folder contains a hierarchy of folders which map to the applications folders and notes, the names of the folders are unique numbers - database primary keys. The database data is kept in a file named "data" in the top level folder and may be accessed with third party tools if desired.

Index

Mindburn also maintains an index for rapid searching of textual data, this is also kept in the toplevel folder and is named "index", deleting this folder will cause Mindburn to regenerate the index the next time it is launched.