http://blog.plasticsfuture.org Mac OS X Gordian Knots Smashed Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:24:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2007/04/28/backup-bouncer-metadata-test-suite/ Yesterday, an interesting discussion about file metadata has begun on darwin-dev. Apple's Jordan Hubbard argued how file creation dates should not be preserved when copying files. In this piece, I counter that treating file creation dates as first-class metadata citizens and preserving them upon copying is the more sensible thing to do, and eventually represents the behavior expected by most Mac users.]]> http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/06/27/mac-os-file-creation-dates/ http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/asr-broken-in-1046/ Earlier, I wrote about The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X, where I made the point that copying files on Mac OS X is not trivial because of the metadata associated with files. I analyzed a variety of file copying engines, most of them command-line tools, and demonstrated how they fare in preserving file metadata. In this article, I will investigate commonly used GUI backup/cloning tools for Mac OS X. The tools vary widely with respect to their feature set; the features are irrelevant here. I will concentrate purely on the underlying functionality of copying files. A backup tool needs to be able to copy files faithfully for a successful restore in case desaster has struck. The surprising conclusion of my investigation is that almost all Macintosh Backup tools fail at their most basic task, the faithful copying of files.]]> http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-backup-software-harmful/ http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/04/mac-os-x-1046s-isync-22-adds-nokia-series-40-support/ http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/23/short-downtime/ http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-state-of-backup-and-cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/ http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/04/ichat-audiovideo-chat-and-file-transfer-behind-nat/ http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/04/install-cvs2svn-on-mac-os-x-1042/