About 18 months ago I did a lot of testing of Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner (rsync), Disk Utility (asr), but not Super Duper (ditto). And in various ways the net result is ambiguous what I actually got after the restore, except with asr sector copies which are identical to the original, even after a file system resize. But it's butt slow and so you're better off using dd and setting the block size to bs=512k or even bs=1m to get vastly better throughput disk to disk. Of course that won't resize, but if you're resizing bigger, you can do that afterthefact with diskutil resize (shrinking can be flakey esp if there's much fragmentation).
I'd variably get slightly different file size results between original and restored versions with all other methods, and I'm convinced it was metadata related because the data itself was totally intact and verifiably intact - i.e. md5sums would be the same. But that only looks at the file data, not metadata. As for symbolic links, I rarely use them, but I do occasionally use aliases. I'm stumped on why sometimes they restore and work, and sometimes they don't. Right now I have a fairly recent restored from Time Machine drive (system, apps, data) and not a single alias works. None can be fixed. I don't know why. So as I come across them, I just make new ones. I just tried using cat and hexdump on some of these busted aliases, nothing. The file system says they have a few hundred to a couple thousand bytes, but I have no access to the contents at all. hexdump is basically saying it's a zero length file, yet the file system says there's data in the file. A new alias on the other hand is much larger, about 200KB, and hexdump finds a ton of information inside. No idea what's going on, but I've found aliases to be fragile and just break. Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
