[Apfhex]

It just so happens that my friend has an almost empty 40GB HDD in his PC that I can use as backup for my files so that I can Format and Install when Panther arrives.

What I'm wondering here is, what's the safest way to put these files on the PC without loosing any information (resource forks and whatnot). I've tested transferring .dmg files, which seems to work (though I cannot mount them over the network, I have to copy them back to my Mac before they will work again), but I'm curious if there are any other "safe" compression formats to use, or if it would all be the same. The reason for putting the files into archives is because I have a lot of Windows incompatible file names which I would not be able to copy.

[jetta_gt]

i would make a DMG and then zip that.

[Abstrakt]

The safest and fastest way to do this would be with tar, an invaluable UNIX utility already installed on your Mac. I used this method the other day to backup my Powerbook's HD to a much larger disk on my Windows box.

Assuming you've already created and mounted a share named "WinBackup" on the Windows machine, you just need to type one line from the command shell (Terminal.app):

Code:
sudo tar -pcvf /Volumes/WinBackup/backup.tar /

This will create an uncompressed archive named "backup.tar" on the Windows box, preserving the directory hierarchy and permissions of your entire system.

You could also tell tar to compress the archive using either gzip or bzip2... This will dramatically reduce the size of the archive, but it will obviously also slow down the backup operation. Type man tar for the full documentation.

Cheers.

[Mithras]

Originally posted by Abstrakt:
The safest and fastest way to do this would be with tar, an invaluable UNIX utility already installed on your Mac.

No.

tar ignores resource forks.

While just doing a network copy should work fine, I agree that a DMG is the absolute safest route.

Also, to make sure it came across okay, do a
md5 /path/to/backup.dmg

before you copy; then, connect to the windows machine over SMB, and do a
md5 /Volumes/Windowsbox/path/to/backup.dmg

to make sure they're identical.

[michael_on_mac]

Hi!

What about piping ditto and then put it through tar like tar cfvz -?

Michael, off-mac right now.

[Apfhex]

Originally posted by Mithras:
Also, to make sure it came across okay, do a
md5 /path/to/backup.dmg

before you copy; then, connect to the windows machine over SMB, and do a
md5 /Volumes/Windowsbox/path/to/backup.dmg

to make sure they're identical.

Hmm, thanks for that tip. I tried it out on a test.dmg and it was identical after copying, and then copying back.