Mac Geekery

Time Machine can restore metadata, ACLs, permissions, extended attribs, meta, forks and inodes – rsync cannot.

While this concerns only a small percentage of people, it IS a concern and a big one for the people it affects. It would seem there are virtually no backup softwares capable of versioning for Mac OS X that copy ACLs, Unix perms, extended attributes, metadata/forks/inodes. And if one utility does copy.. say.. ACLs, it doesn’t copy forks (for whatever reason).

Super Duper is actually the ONLY backup software to copy absolutely everything, including all the extended file system stuff. Unfortunately, it is only really useful for image dumping… not for individual file versioning.

Time Machine might be the first program to actually allow versioned backups AND copy all the extras for Mac OS X. I think this is worth pointing out to anyone who plans on using rsync. It does not, for example, copy ACLs…