Restoring to a folder

[ericob]

[FYI, it is not that I consider potential scanning a threat to the integrity of my files... it is that the image is mounted read/write, and in that condition anyone or anything can mess with the data, and that messing-with will be saved without any notification when you unmount the image. A simple "slip of the wrist" here could erase the entire contents of your disk image. Leaving the image intact, but empty. Something as critically important as data from a backed up disk should never be left this vulnerable.]

However, regarding the main thread: I believe I have found the solution to restoring a backed up volume to a folder.

This little adventure is my current winner for "Far, Far More Difficult than it Needs to Be (or even Is)."


Recall that my problem was how to "reshuffle" the contents of partitions and drives on my system. At my (apparent) success point, I have gone from 5 drives and 14 partitions down to 4 drives and 7 partitions. Probably still too many, but this is FAR more manageable!

The sticking point in this was my desire to back up a volume (a partition) and restore it to a FOLDER.

• SuperDuper! can't do this.
• CarbonCopyCloner can't do this.
• Impression (a backup utility) appeared to be doing it, but screwed up the modification dates (and who knows what else) of not all, but most, of the files restored. It also restored them to a bogus "/Volumes" folder inside the folder I specified. Plus, the "archive file" is actually just a package with every single file on the volume (but none of the folders) individually stored in an archive. I can't imagine that's very efficient.

PLEASE, if anybody reading this believes that I may be making a Really Big Mistake, do let me know! But the answer appears to be to use the built-in command line utility "ditto" running as root.

Under 10.4 ditto by default preserves resource forks -- when using a OS X version earlier than 10.4 you must explicitly use the switch "--rsrc" or "-rsrcFork" ("Preserve resource forks and HFS meta-data").

SO. Consider that I have a partition [or a mounted disk image] named "Downloads" whose entire contents I want to move to a FOLDER named "Downloads," which exists on a different volume. I want the "cloned" files to be identical (as near as possible) to the originals. Specifically: I want the creation and modification dates and the permissions of every "copied" file to be identical to the original. Of course, I also want all meta-data preserved.

Hey, it's easy!

The form is

ditto source_dir destination_dir

I want to avoid any problems copying files I don't own, so I run ditto as root:

sudo ditto /Volumes/Downloads /Volumes/chinesemenu/Downloads

("chinesemenu" is a new volume I recently created) Presto! 30 minutes or so later, everything is copied. By the way, Impression took about 4 HOURS to restore the same volume.

ditto apparently also copies invisible files. This is both good... and problematic. I don't think I need to (and in fact, maybe I shouldn't) copy those hundreds of .DS_Store files. What about the .Trashes files? The "501, 502 and 503" folders? An empty "Cleanup at Startup" folder? AppleShare PDS, Desktop, Desktop DB and Desktop DF files? A folder named "EU2P9I1J4FI58RJ8NMDF9901C8" contained in a folder named "HFSExtentTables" (Created and Modified December 12, 2002)?? Etc., etc., etc. (You can see I've had this drive, or at least its data, around for some while!)

If anyone has any suggestions about invisible files I most certainly should find and delete, please let me know.

If anyone knows of a way to tell ditto to skip files matching a particular criterion, please let me know too.

And, like I said, if I'm really making a Big Mistake using ditto for this, please tell me about that, too.

Thanks!