The Underscore Archives

On 7 Dec 2006, at 13:18, Oliver Humpage wrote:

> Pretty much (although there's probably Windows apps to read unixy
> filesystems). But watch out - Mac files will lose their resource  
> forks when
> copying onto anything non-HFS+. It's a really bad idea to use  
> anything else
> for backups - even QT movies (created with earlier versions of QT)  
> won't
> play if they lose their resource forks.

You sure about that?  I thought resource forks were stored  
in ._<filename> files... works for me.

HOWEVER, there is a good reason for being careful about non-HFS+  
filesystems.  Apple have neglected non-HFS+ drivers, so the UFS and  
FAT32 drivers are supposedly much slower and more crufty.

I must admit, I haven't found a happy compromise between the two.  I  
ended up saying "screw it" and HFSing my external drives.  If I need  
to plug them into a Windows box, then I'm largely buggered.

Fortunately, I got HFS (barely) usable on my Debian-based  
LinkStation, so at a push I can read my external drives on that.


> If you want to backup onto a non-HFS+ disk, create a sparse  
> diskimage on it
> first, mount it, and copy to that. Of course, then your PC won't be  
> able to
> read the files in the disk image, so no good if you want to do  
> that. But
> it's fine for backups.

Not a bad idea, now that they've improved the disk image format.

I've got a bunch of old (NDIF?) image files that have lost their  
resource forks, and as a result are completely unreadable.  I haven't  
found any software that will open them, as I understand that all the  
disk catalogue stuff is in the (missing) resource fork.  Grr.

Tom

-- 
Tom Gidden
http://gidden.net/tom/