site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On Jun 25, 2006, at 11:50 AM, Dan Shoop wrote: - boyd Boyd Waters National Radio Astronomy Observatory Socorro, New Mexico _______________________________________________ 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... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com 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/ Is there really no way to copy a file - along with *all* metadata* - in one operation? smime.p7s