Archiving in Smoke > Supplementing Archives with System Drive Backups > Browsing an Archive Offline >

# Online Tables of Contents

The table of contents lists the contents of the archive, as well as information such as the order in which clips are assembled on the archive, clip IDs, transitions, and timecodes. When you restore an archive with the table of contents, Smoke uses this information to restore the material.

A copy of the table of contents is saved in the filesystem. This copy is referred to as the Online Table of Contents (OTOC). You can open an archive in read-only mode using the OTOC. In read-only mode, you can load but not save or delete entries from the archive. With VTR archives, you can open an archive in read-write mode using the OTOC, and save and delete entries from the archive.

The OTOC is useful for:

- Recovering material in an archive when the table of contents on the medium is corrupted.
- Viewing the contents of an archive without opening it, which is often faster than actually opening the archive.

When an OTOC is created, Smoke creates an ASCII text copy of it (ATOC) as well as an HTML and XML copy. Use the ASCII and HTML copies to view the contents of an archive without opening it. For example, use them to view the contents of a VTR archive without connecting to the VTR.

Use the XML TOC to easily populate a database with information about your archives.

The OTOC, ATOC, HTML, and XML table of contents are saved by default to /usr/discreet/archive. Or define the location by adding the following token to the init.cfg file:

ArchiveLibrary <directory>

where <directory> is the location for storing your archives.

The OTOC is updated each time you close the archive.