site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=sha1; boundary=Apple-Mail-7--985797476; protocol="application/pkcs7-signature" On Jun 25, 2006, at 11:50 AM, Dan Shoop wrote: Not currently it seems. :( -dhan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Shoop AIM: iWiring Systems & Networks Architect http://www.ustsvs.com/ shoop@iwiring.net http://www.iwiring.net/ 1-714-363-1174 pgp key fingerprint: FAC0 9434 B5A5 24A8 D0AF 12B1 7840 3BE7 3736 DE0B iWiring provides systems and networks support for Mac OS X, unix, and Open Source application technologies at affordable rates. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... At 2:32 PM -0600 6/25/06, Boyd Waters wrote: However copyfile() doesn't seem to preserve *all* the complete, necessary and expected data associated with Mac HFS[+] files nor does the ._file mechanism. Specifically symlink ownership, creation date, and file ID info for Aliases will get clobbered. And there's also Finder information and Spotlight data stored in the .DS_Store's And currently (10.4.6) there appears to be no shipping tool that can copy a file completely. ASR, hdiutil, ditto, cp (and copyfile() reliant mechanisms) all miss something. Sometimes rather badly. It would be nice if Apple would at least stuff the creation date in the ._file under OS X. :( Wow. Which is why this review of backup software found that only *one* of all the tools available will preserve all metadata: http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-backup-software-harmful/ In all fairness, the subset of tools covered there is limited. For instance that blog entry doesn't even mention tar (which fares worse than cp, btw) or using disk images for backup, nor does it even cover the popular backup sw package contenders (such as BRU, Retrospect, et al.) Also its focus is more towards backup than copying, which was the direction of the OP's question. But it does seem to nicely cover some of the issues I was referring to. Is there really no way to copy a file - along with *all* metadata* - in one operation? And probably it's going to be a very long wait, so long as Apple keeps cruft in .DS_Store's as said cruft would need to be copied between source and target .DS_Store's which is a Moreover Spotlight non-comment metadata isn't likely to get copied ever, but probably shouldn't be either; nor is there much value as the kernel can just re-create it. -- This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com