On Jan 18, 2008, at 8:14 AM, Moritz Heckscher wrote:

Hello all,

I'm new to the list, but have done quite a bit of researching before regarding the support of Mac OS X specific features (resource forks, extended attributes, ACLs, file creation & modification date).

By reading the archives, I get the impression that the current version of rsync 3.0.0pre8 is quite far in this respect. At least it sounds so, and I thank the developers very much for this! I like your approach much more than the (very buggy) one originally pursued by Apple (store metadata in separate ._ file).


Be careful and test, test, test. I tried using pre8 to sync two local Xserve RAID's(about 2TB of data) and I'm seeing these errors.

rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes [sender]: Broken pipe (32)
[receiver] internal abbrev error!
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at xattrs.c(565) [receiver=3.0.0pre8] rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (175959 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(600) [sender=3.0.0pre8]

I have another Xserve RAID(about 1.3TB) and I don't get those errors when syncing with pre8. I'm trying to pin down what files/folders are causing the problem now.

I plan to do the following:

* Run a Linux server (Ubuntu, I guess, on a ext3 partition) with two separate internal ATA hard disks formatted in XFS and configured in software RAID to store the actual backup data. (As I understand, I should use XFS rather than ext3 because XFS supports extended attributes large enough to hold also larger converted Mac resource forks.)

* Back up from different Mac OS X clients (cuurently all on 10.4, but I might upgrade them to 10.5 later) to the server using rsync over ssh. This should hopefully preserve (most of) the Mac-specifif metadata on the server. (Actually I plan to use rsnapshot, but I believe if I have rsync installed in the newest version and possibly tell rsnaphot to use the appropriate rsync options, things will be the same.)

Now my question is the following:

1) What would I have to do to ensure the metadata is also restored correctly? I assume I will have to use rsync for restoring also, and if I just copy over data (using, e.g, scp or over an AFP or CIFS or NFS network mount), I will lose this metadata. Is this correct?


Why not use rsync3 for both backup and restore. Either use ssh (rsync - azXA --delete /path/to/source server:/path/to/target) or setup an rsync daemon server. This way you let rsync handle the metadata.



Another problem I'm thinking about is that rsnapshot should be run on the server to "pull" the backups over the network. One cannot run it on the clients and "push" the data to the server over the network -- which is what I'd prefer because I plan to not leave the server on all day but rather have it woken up by the (laptop) clients when needed who'll take care of the scheduling of the backups (using anachron or launchd etc.) One could, however, run rsnapshot on the clients to backup onto a locally attached storage device.


You don't need rsnapshot. Use the --link-dist option to create incremental backups.

This leads me to the second question:

2) If I mount the server as a network drive on the clients using AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS, ..., and then backup to this 'locally attached' drive with rsync (using rsnapshot), will I lose the metadata because of the transfer via the SMB/... layer?

Thanks a lot for a great program!
-Moritz

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David Miller.
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