John Roy's Wiki

TBD

Preserve File and Directory Meta-Data

I want to preserve file meta-data (access permissions, ownership, creation/access/modification times). Centralized volumes which need to be accessed via various network file-system protocols and mounted on different machines often have to discard part or all of the file meta-data. I use NFS, Windows Sharing and SSHFS mount read/write on Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux. Seems this problem should be simple but many combinations are not robust, for example some of the following are troublesome:

• Journaled hfsplus mounted in Linux
• Using Samba share for serious stuff on Mac OS
• Sharing USB connected storage via Samba or NFS from Linux
• Ext3 mounted in Mac OS.
• etc. etc.

All of these things are solvable, but I want to stay mainstream enough that I can use standard tools from stable branches of mainstream repositories. And it's really got to be 100% trouble free.