This week, I’ve taken a very close look at how various Mac utilities deal with the plethora of metadata available in MacOS X. I took a look at file archiving and compression programs, backup and synchronization software, and also released a set of test files for other people to verify my own tests and run their own.

In addition to what I’ve published, I’ve corresponded with various closed and open source developers to learn more about what’s going on under the hood, and have come to a few conclusions which I think are worth sharing.

Following up on my earlier test of Mac archiving software, I decided to test some popular file copying/synchronization software to see which of these programs kept metadata and other Mac/HFS+ attributes intact. Rather than do a comprehensive test, I tried some popular utilities which seem to cover the general breadth of the software and which are particularly popular or prevalent. I also wanted to catch programs which had been updated since this article was written a year ago.

If you want detail on other utilities, I recommend reading the article linked above, or doing your own tests if you have the time. (And please let us know what you find out!)

A number of people seemed to enjoy my coverage of how poorly most Mac archiving programs work with Mac/HFS+ metadata. However, a number of people also thought that I might have tested incorrectly (it’s possible!) and wanted to know how other sorts of utilities (such as file synchronization programs) handled Mac files.

My current project is to enable network backups of my Mac and my wife’s PC over the internet, so that we have an off-site backup of last resort, should our house burn down, fall over, and then sink into the swamp.

Anyone who’s used a Mac for a long time knows that transferring Mac-native files over the internet is fraught with peril. You risk losing type and creator codes and resource forks, as well as a number of other forms of metadata introduced with MacOS X. So my first step was to determine how I could safely encode my files so that they could make the trip to a foreign server (which would either by a Linux-type box on my web host, or an Amazon S3 account) and then back again, with the file intact for recovery.