rsync - Aug 2004 - rsync, backup, Macintosh files

Hey!

I have been given the task to mirror our fileserver's filesystem onto a 
secondary machine for redundancy. The first thing that came to mind was 
rsync, but now I have few questions as I am far from an expert on this 
matter.

Our file server is running Debian Stable. We use Samba for our Windows 
users and Netatalk (AFP) for our OS X clients. The filesystem used on 
the server is ReiserFS if that is of any intress. Since we keep a lot 
of fonts etc. on the disks, I am really conserned about the resource 
forks not being properly handled by rsync during backup or restore ? 
this is critical!

So, through Google I noticed a couple of projects dedicated to patches 
or binaries of rsync which allowed for the safe keeping of resource 
forks ? but these projects were targeted for OS X, not GNU / Linux. 
Hence, this e-mail to you all... I'm hoping someone out there can share 
their wealth of knowledge regarding this issue which I certainly cannot 
be the first one to encounter. Any solutions or workarounds would be of 
great help!

Thanks everyone!


//didde.
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If your files are on the Linux fileserver and accessed by the OSX
clients via Netatalk, then resource forks and Finder metadata are
already being stored in a format that rsync understands.  Just run
rsync as usual.

If you were running HFS+ on the Linux box (hey, why not?), *then*
you'd need to do something special.  With ReiserFS or any of the
other common Linux filesystems, you'll have no problem.

Take a look on your fileserver.  For fonts, etc, you should find
the data fork in "Fontname", and the resource fork and metaddata
in "._Fontname".  Both files will get backed up by rsync without
problem.  If you need to do a restoration, the easiest thing to
do is restore to the fileserver, and let Netatalk deal with the
format (re-)conversion for you.

If you restore to the OSX box, you'll need to rejoin the forks,
which is a little trickier.  Apple distributes a utility called
FixupResourceForks, but it only implements part of the format
specification (the part used by SplitForks), so it might have
trouble with Netatalk files.

Good luck,
Andrew


On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 10:36:18AM +0200, reg@starring.se
wrote:
> Our file server is running Debian Stable. We use Samba for our Windows 
> users and Netatalk (AFP) for our OS X clients. The filesystem used on 
> the server is ReiserFS if that is of any intress. Since we keep a lot 
> of fonts etc. on the disks, I am really conserned about the resource 
> forks not being properly handled by rsync during backup or restore ? 
> this is critical! 
> 
> So, through Google I noticed a couple of projects dedicated to patches 
> or binaries of rsync which allowed for the safe keeping of resource 
> forks ? but these projects were targeted for OS X, not GNU / Linux.