Re: [NTLK] [OT] FaxSFT (ex: Re: Addendum to Frank Gruendel's Fax story)

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 08:44:27 PDT


Il me semble que le 19/08/03 à 17:12 +0200, Robert Benschop nous racontait:
>What do you call 'any unix program for backup/compression' Paul? I use
>Carbon Copy Cloner, can be found on
>http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html and have been feeling very
>safe so far.
>Would this qualify for the no-go apps for you? (I wouldn't think so but
>I'd rather be sure in such a case!)

Of course not. CCC is fine (very probably, I don't use it, I think it
is but don't ring home with a big stick if ever you lost data with
it). By "unix program" I mean a program that runs on other unices. In
general, anything that uses X Window like what Paul used hasn't been
optimized/specialized for MacOS X particularities (otherwise, it
would use Quartz/Aqua for the graphical user interface -- note, I
wrote "in general"). And therefore, such a program probably isn't
specialized for MacOS X special file APIs. There totally could be a
backup program that was specialized and worked fine on MacOS X as
well on other Unices like Linux or BSDs. I just don't know any but I
didn't really search (I'm an amanda fan and when I followed its
evolution months ago, it didn't work on MacOS X because of this very
problem of resources).

I think Unix commands on MacOS X like cp, dump, mv, rcp, rsync, scp,
tar & friends do not take resources and meta-data into account. I'm
sure about all of them, except for dump and rsync. At some point dump
didn't take resources into account and it's such a pathetical
implementation choice that Apple might have fixed it (but since Disk
Copy does good volumes dump, it's not very likely). I know that rsync
has some MacOS X specific source code but I don't think it takes
resources into account nevertheless.

All this warning actually applies if you choose the faster HFS+ file
system. On UFS, resource forks appear as separate files to unix
programs and are copied properly. I don't know about meta-data on
this file system and in fact, I wouldn't suggest installing MacOS X
on UFS unless you really know what you're doing.

There are command lines utilities that do take resources into
account. This is the case of ditto which CCC is based on (I heard).
This is also the case of CpMac and MvMac installed with the developer
tools.

Anyway, you'd rather avoid any program using these commands or POSIX
APIs to copy files. On MacOS X, I think the only APIs that can take
full advantage of MacOS X file system features is Carbon.

Paul

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