Report on My Recent Experiment re Suitability of My Info Pro as Replacement for TreePad X Enterprise

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VinnyP
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Sep 19, 2019 3:24 pm

Report on My Recent Experiment re Suitability of My Info Pro as Replacement for TreePad X Enterprise

Post by VinnyP »

Background
Since around early 2010, I used TreePad Plus as my primary personal information manager (PIM)/database for storing several sets of information for my personal use and for my scientific R&D work. By March 2012, two of those five "databases" had grown in size to the point where TreePad Plus could no longer handle them, and so, after doing quite a bit of due diligence regarding the best tool to which to migrate my "databases", I switched to using TreePad X Enterprise 12GB.

TreePad X Enterprise served my needs well for a number of years, although I was admittedly wary of the fact that TreePad's developers were very tardy in releasing updates to the program, and were exhibiting no progress at all in releasing a number of long-promised features, including the option of encryption and securing a TreePad X Enterprise database under password protection, and several other rather important long-awaited features, including the ability to export files in a file format that would include not only the tree along with text and any images contained in the articles, but that would also include attached files in formats such as PDF and Word Doc formats that had been stored under the Attachments tab in articles/nodes.

Incidentally, TreePad released only one update to TreePad X Enterprise 12 GB in the period after I had switched to it, and that was the update to version 7.17, which was released on January 9, 2014. It is true that they kept promising more updates/upgrades that would include a number of long-promised features, but these never materialized.

Then, more recently, starting over the past two months, perhaps first starting in mid or late July 2019, if not earlier, the signs became unmistakable that the TreePad PIM/database products were no longer simply long-neglected, but were now technically orphaned and obsolete, because the websites for Netherlands-based TreePad and for its parent company Freebyte disappeared entirely from the web, and the sole non-Treepad dot com email address for TreePad customer support, a fee-based email account at USA dot net for TreePad's purported tech support person, Joan Powell, disappeared, and emails sent to the account were met with a brief reply message from the mailserver indicating that the customer's account had been discontinued.

At this point, I ramped up the priority and the intensity of my long-running but very low-intensity and low-priority search for a suitable replacement PIM software tool to which I could migrate my TreePad X Enterprise databases, several of which were by now very large, and each of which not only had lots of images (in .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif and other image formats) stored in articles but also numerous PDF files and other files stored under the Attachments tab of many articles.

Introduction
My search finally identified My Info Pro as having a high potential for suitability as a replacement PIM to which I might wish to migrate my TreePad X Enterprise databases, and so I recently purchased a copy of My Info Pro and installed it on my Windows 10 Pro desktop PC (modern fast multi-core processor, 16 GB RAM, over 1 TB SSD drive, and yes, I keep Windows 10 Professional fully updated).

I then exported one of my smaller databases from TreePad X Enterprise to a single file in .hjt format, directing TreePad Enterprise to place the output files (I use the plural because when you ask TreePad X Enterprise to export a database to .hjt format, it actually creates two files, one of them a .hjt file containing the tree, articles and text, and an accompanying file with a .tpz filename extension that contains all of the images from the articles) in a special directory that I had created on my drive for only that purpose. (BTW, .hjt is actually the older TreePad file format, after they moved from pure text files, and the newer .tpd file format is a non-ASCII format, but at this point in time, My Info Pro can import only from the more primitive TreePad .hjt format, and not from the more sophisticated TreePad .tpd file format. Incidentally, it appears that neither the TreePad .hjt or .tpd file formats allow for storing bookmarks, nor do they store any attached files (such as PDF files) that had been stored in the Attachments tabs for articles.) The database that I had exported contained about 3115 nodes/articles, and a bit under 200 MB of information (including the images).

Observations
After the successful export of the database from TreePad X Enterprise to .hjt format, I then attempted to import the file to My Info Pro. Although the import took a while (as expected) and although My Info Pro often flashed a cryptic (Not Responding) message during the process, the process was successfully completed within 21 minutes.

When I opened the imported file in My Info Pro, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that My Info had successfully imported the entire database, with the tree and articles/nodes and their contents in perfect condition, but that it had also successfully imported ALL of the images (and each with perfect sizing and positioning within the article) that had been present in many of the articles.

Now, this last discovery was a very pleasant shock, and was entirely unexpected, because the sad reality up until that time had been that every PIM/database tool that I had tested over the past 3 years as potential successors to TreePad X Enterprise and that claimed to be able to import TreePad X Enterprise files using the TreePad .hjt format had, even if they managed to successfully import the tree, article and text (and not all of them managed to succeed at this task), NONE of them had managed to import any of the images that had been stored in TreePad articles/nodes. And yet, here was My Info Pro, which had just managed to import all of the images perfectly!

Of course, as expected (simply because the TreePad .hjt file format does not support such things), the only things that were not transferred were:
1) Any and all files stored in the TreePad nodes under Attachments tab.
2) All Bookmarks for the database.
3) All icons for the nodes in the database tree.

Some Observations
I then spent many hours exploring the various features of the My Info Pro software. Some notes follow:

I really like the user interface. Not only is the database tree-structure, but both the tree and the documents/nodes are WYSIWYG, and are also very much free form, rather than structured, and thus I kinda felt as much at home in My Info Pro as I had been in TreePad X Enterprise.

I also really appreciate the fact that My Info Pro offers full file encryption/security options.

I also liked the fact that automatic creation of Backup files can easily be set up in Options.

The sole problem that I noticed, and it was one that is of sufficient magnitude that I will likely choose not to migrate most of my TreePad X Enterprise databases, is that whenever I SAVE the file, the time needed for the SAVE is on the order of 32 seconds per SAVE (I am able to shave off almost 2 seconds if I disable the "create backup file on Save" option, but that is insignificant). In contrast, when I SAVED the same file in TreePad X Enterprise, the Save operation took less than 1 second. Further, when I imported the same database into Ultra Recall (which was, however, unable to import the images), the time needed per SAVE was on the order of 100 milliseconds, and I have noticed similar short SAVE times for other competing tree structured hierarchical database-style PIMs that I have tested over the past year, although they all were unable to import images.

This problem of slow SAVE operations is of particular importance to me because the TreePad database that I used for this test contained only 3115 nodes and a bit less than 200 MB in file size. My larger TreePad databases contain up to 24,000 nodes and up to 1.8 GB in file size. So, I can only shudder when I imagine how long it would take My Info to SAVE such a large file!

So, I guess that it is at this point that I ask the developer the following question: Is there any way that the SAVE time can be shortened at least 32-fold?

Any assistance would be appreciated! Thank you!
Petko
MyInfo Support
Posts: 3237
Joined: Sun Jul 25, 2004 4:33 pm
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Post by Petko »

Yes, MyInfo 6 could be slow to save large topics. MyInfo 7 on the other hand will be really fast. Would you like to try the beta version of MyInfo 7? Please drop me a line at support@milenix.com.
VinnyP
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Sep 19, 2019 3:24 pm

Post by VinnyP »

Hello Petko:

Thank you very much for your kind reply above. My answers in brief, are: sounds great, yes, and yes, I will contact you shortly!

Thank you.
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