Hello,
From my research, it appears that Rclone does not support extended attributes on OSX or Linux. Please see the links below.
This problem seems to make Rclone unusable with OSX and possibly Linux. Is this a correct assumption?
Does Rclone copy Windows alternate data streams?
Is there a plan to integrate extended attribute support into Rclone?
Thank you in advance for your help. Rclone seems like a great program. I simply want to ensure that my data (and metadata) are safe.
That is correct, yes.
This is something which could be fixed in the local backend, the file might appear as file.txt with file.txt.xattrs by the side.
What is your use case for rclone? If you are using it for backups then you might be better off using restic - you can then use rclone as a restic backend to back up to any cloud providers that rclone supports.
Thank you for your reply, @ncw.
My current use case is backing up a Windows client to a yet unknown cloud provider (most likely a Google or Amazon product).
The reason I asked about Linux and OSX is because I am an IT Manager, and some of my machines may end up being OSX (and very rarely, Linux).
Could you please explain how to handle xattrs on the local backend?
Also, how would using Rclone as a Restic backend solve the xattrs problem?
Thank you.
It would need a code patch to rclone.
restic stores the attrs in binary blobs. It then uses rclone to save these blobs to a cloud provider, saving and restoring attributes and permissions.
rclone syncs files on a 1:1 basis to cloud providers so only supports operations the cloud providers support, which doesn't include extended attributes.
Thanks again for your help.
I was just studying Restic. It would seem that if I use Restic and Rclone, the 1:1 ratio between my original file system and the cloud would be broken. Is this accurate?
Some cloud storage providers do support xattrs (Rsync.net). Do you (or your team) have any plans to add xattr support to Rclone?
Yes, that is correct.
There are some issues about it but I don't think anyone is working on it right now.
Would you like to help?
Thanks again for your reply.
I would love to help you out. The only problem is that I don't know Go. I am at the very beginning of transferring from IT to programming, so the only languages I currently know are C and a bit of C++.
Maybe someday I will learn Go.
Thanks again for all of your help.
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