PATCH: preserve osx creation-date (was: Using pre2 for backing up a mac)

[Wesley W. Terpstra]

On Oct 15, 2007, at 5:07 PM, Victor Shoup wrote:
> What would be nice is if rsync supported this directly, with the  
> shadow files (with names appropriately tweaked)
> stored in the same directory structure.   This is essentially  
> Apple's solution for dealing with foreign file systems
> that are mounted locally (e.g., NFS shares or local UFS volumes),  
> but this does not work at all
> between mac osx and a remote file server accessed via ssh.

The problem with doing this is that you've separated the meta-data  
from the file. I don't think rsync should do this itself. It  
introduces problems when other tools interact with your backup. It's  
very easy to lose the meta-data.

Unfortunately, ext3 seems to have a very low limit on extended  
attributes (resource forks tend to be too big). XFS works great, but  
on a couple of my machines (one is an Infrant ReadyNAS) I can't avoid  
using ext3. For this scenario I've written a FUSE filesystem that  
simply redirects extended attributes into an sqlite3 database (which  
it keys by inode, so nothing breaks). This accomplishes what you  
wanted with your shadow files, but on the filesystem level it doesn't  
separate the meta-data from the file. It also means rsync can stick  
to doing just its own job.

It seems Solaris has FUSE, so maybe this would work for you too...
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/fuse/