In the first part of this series I mentioned that having lots of disk space in your laptop is really important and well worth spending a bit extra to get. The real value of this is that data on the hard disk weighs nothing, while stuff carried on paper is bulky and heavy and could just be what causes your bag to end up as hold baggage--but hopefully not with the laptop inside it, too. Plenty of disk space is important because you have to carry every information source you need with you; you can't rely on being able to find what you need when you get there. You just might not be able to get an Internet connection or be able to plug into your customer's network. And reading the Notes help over a phone line, especially via a cell phone, is a very frustrating way to work.

What should you take with you?
Assuming you're a Notes professional (why else would you be reading this?) you'll want to take the Notes help databases. Actually, you probably won't have much need for the end user help, but carry both the admin and designer help databases, because whatever you do with Notes, development or administration, you will find them useful. Make sure that they're full text indexed.

While we mention full-text indexes, let me tell you about a couple of little quirks that can happen with full-text indexed databases. The full-text index is really an add-on to the Notes database structure; you can see that from the fact that the index files are not kept in the database, but as a separate file system structure in a .ft directory. One quirk: if you replace an indexed Notes database by replacing the file--as you would when doing a client upgrade, the index doesn't get updated and you get really, really odd search results. To fix this, you need to delete and recreate the index and not just update it.

Updating the database by replication or by creating a new copy of the database and overwriting the old file is fine; it's replacing the database file from outside of Notes that causes this issue. Conversely, deleting the index files subdirectory might delete the index, but Notes will still think that the database is indexed. In this case, you'll get lots of errors from the indexer recorded in your local log about missing files. If you want to stop a database being full-text indexed, delete the index via the database properties.