Importing And Removing Root Directories

Importing root directories

To import files that shall be observed by the HSD Versions Cleaner, suitable directories must be imported. In HSD Versions Cleaner’s terminology, these directories are called  root directories . A root directory is a directory that contains the files to observe either directly or even indirectly within any subdirectory beneath the imported root directory.

An imported root directory always appears as a  top level entry  within the  Navigator View’s  directory/file hierarchy.

The  Navigator View  only shows files for which at least one old file version snapshot exists. But this doesn’t mean that a file not shown at a certain point of time will never be observed. As a matter of fact, its owning directory will always be observed, and as soon as a  first snapshot  has been stored for a file that belongs to an imported directory this file will be imported and observed from then on automatically.


Deep mode and flat mode root directories

By default, when importing a root directory, also its subdirectories will be imported as well as the subdirectories of the subdirectories and so on. Root directories imported this way are called  deep mode root directories . This behavior, however, can be opted out while choosing a directory that shall be imported as a root directory - in this case the imported directory is then called  flat mode root directory . For flat mode root directories only files within exactly that directory will be observed - files that belong to any descending subdirectory of an imported flat mode root directory will be ignored entirely.

Flat mode root directories allow to compose a fine grained set of files that should be observed. For the majority of users, however, importing directories as deep mode root directories should be appropriate.

To distinguish deep mode root directories from flat mode root directories, the  Navigator View  shows them in different font styles. These font styles can be changed within the  User Preferences .


Importing a second, third, … etc, root directory

Of course, it’s possible to import more than just one root directory. However, there are two situations that should be taken into account:


The following two sections deal with the practical part of importing and removing root directories:



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