Database cleanup tool?

[nabsltd]

With the current version of MainType, if a user moves/deletes a font file that is in a "sync" folder, when the folder refreshes, the font is no longer displayed in MainType. This behavior makes sense, and is intuitive.

If the user moved the file to a different "sync" folder (or even moved it back to the same folder) and refreshed, it appears in the display and any tags associated with it are remembered. Again, this behavior makes sense, and is exactly what a user would want.

The question is if the user really deletes the font file because they don't want it any more, how can they clean up the database entry? If this happens enough, eventually the database will take up significant disk space for a useless purpose...fonts that the user doesn't care about.

When the paradigm was that fonts were never deleted, but merely "ignored", the exact same issue existed, and users couldn't do anything about it then, either. Now, the main difference is the user doesn't have a way to see the "ignored" fonts except through the disk space they take up. Also, users now don't have the ability to "restore" an ignored/deleted font, which at least made the old system have some value.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Since I have only about 5,000 fonts in my library, if I want to clean up my database I just uninstall MainType removing all data and then reinstall. It does not take many minutes, and regenerating groups from my folders is automatic.

[nabsltd]

Since I have only about 5,000 fonts in my library,

OK, so you have a very small font library...DaFont.com lists 3,800 fonts beginning with the letter 'S', and those are actually font families. A 5,000 font library is nothing, even staying strictly within the law, and without having to pay a dime. You might even get there with just fonts that start with 'S' from DaFont.

if I want to clean up my database I just uninstall MainType removing all data and then reinstall. It does not take many minutes, and regenerating groups from my folders is automatic.

Only "sync" groups get regenerated by doing this, because it's part of the disk structure. Any groups where you manually place the font into them (like the people who use groups to sort by PANOSE) are not re-created. You also lose all custom views, custom layouts, etc. Until version 8, you would also lose all tags. Obviously, you don't use many MainType features, or you would realize the pain caused by uninstall/reinstall. So, just because you wouldn't use a feature, doesn't mean it doesn't need to exist.

As for the space issue, I only have about 4,000 fonts in the MainType database right now, as I'm working with tools that have some better features to cull the other 70,000 font files for duplicates. What worries me is that with that small number of fonts in MainType, the "vault" file has grown by nearly 512MB in 19 days, and there are "vault" files that haven't been modified in the past two years that are taking up around 2GB of space. Since the total size of font files indexed by MainType is around 350MB, this means that the vault is taking up 7x as much space as the font files. So, adding those 70,000 files whose size on disk is around 7GB would mean 50GB for the vault (if the space required stays the same).