Backup Central

Hello,

I've been using rdiff-backup for quite a while now and I love it. It's a
wonderful tool; my thanks to the developers!

I have a question about backing up my Powerbook to my Linux box. Do the
resource forks get backed up, and can they be restored?

Also, do I care about the resource forks? I have a bunch of regular sorts
of files in my Powerbook home directory; if any of them lost their resource
fork in being restored, would that bother me?

(As you can likely tell, I'm a new Mac user -- since April. I know Linux
far better than OS X.)

Thanks!

Dan Drake

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On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 at 12:38PM -0500, Dan Drake wrote:
I have a question about backing up my Powerbook to my Linux box. Do the
resource forks get backed up, and can they be restored?

Oops. I forgot to say I'm using rdiff-backup 0.13.4 and Python 2.3 on both
systems.

Dan

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On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 12:38:19 -0500
Dan Drake <dan < at > dandrake.org> wrote:

Hi Dan

I've been using rdiff-backup for quite a while now and I love it. It's a
wonderful tool; my thanks to the developers!

Singular: Ben Escoto is pretty much the sole developer.

I have a question about backing up my Powerbook to my Linux box. Do the
resource forks get backed up, and can they be restored?

Two answers: you could just try it and find out. If you did that, then you
would KNOW the answer, but as it is I will tell you. Yes. Now, do you want
to believe me and trust all your data to rdiff-backup, or do you want to
test it?

Bit tongue in cheek, but it would have been quicker and more trustworthy to
test it than to ask here.

Good luck!

Keith

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On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 at 09:12PM +0100, Keith Edmunds wrote:
I have a question about backing up my Powerbook to my Linux box. Do the
resource forks get backed up, and can they be restored?

Two answers: you could just try it and find out. If you did that, then
you would KNOW the answer,

Are you a teacher or professor? I'm a math TA, and I enjoy saying things
like that to my students. It annoys them terribly. :)

I took your advice and checked, by moving a file with a resource fork
somewhere else and restoring it from my backup. Yes, rdiff-backup does
preserve resource forks even if you store the backups on a Linux system
(or, presumably, on any non-HFS+ filesystem).

(If there's any other Linux-y types out there who would like to take
Keith's advice and try on their own: the easy way to make a file with a
resource fork is to make an alias in the Finder, which to 'ls' is a
zero-byte file and the alias information in the resource fork. Make the
alias, back it up, delete it, and then try restoring it. There's a nice
blog entry at http://sean.typepad.com/ditto/2004/07/mac_os_x_resour.html
that I found useful.)

Thanks,

Dan

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Keith Edmunds <keith < at > midnighthax.com> writes:
I have a question about backing up my Powerbook to my Linux box. Do the
resource forks get backed up, and can they be restored?

Two answers: you could just try it and find out. If you did that, then you
would KNOW the answer, but as it is I will tell you.

Not really; all he'd know is that his test case worked or didn't.