Backing up.
I’m redoing our backup system, with an eye to the usual stunts using rdiff and hard links to create rolling incremental snapshots, and saved on a Linux box that does little else.
Problem: Mac resource forks. Apple’s rsync supports -E/--extended-attributes which captures all this stuff as AppleDouble files on the remote side, but no stock Linux binaries support this protocol (and apparently Apple’s version has its own brokenness). There’s rdiff-backup, which installs neatly on Ubuntu, but requires a heap of (admittedly handy, but tedious to build and install) libraries when you try to deploy on OS X (1 2 3, and I refuse to let Fink violate my filesystem layout). Finally, there’s Unison, which does everything right on every platform but requires me to keep a persistent server running (which irritates me) and leaves a bunch of state crud in the filesystem (which in my experience can get confused).
I’m thinking the best way forward is to somehow patch rsync on Ubuntu to support -E, because that way I only have to do that once (rather than patching/installing a huge pile of crap on every Mac I want to back up). But if anyone out there in dem Lazyweb has any bright ideas, speak up.