OS X + OS 9 Backup Issues

[Sonic Purity]

Yes, still in 2010 there are some of us running dual-boot OS 9/ OS X PPC Macs. I’m running into a problem with getting the OS 9 content to copy over correctly when using SD!

Setup (testing):

• G4 AGP 450 MHz running OS 10.4.11
• SD! 2.6.2 (v87) run from the internal HD.
• Source hard drive for testing: External FW 400 attached, Apple Partition Map, single Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) partition with both OS X and OS 9 and their contents installed on that one partition
• Destination hard drive: same partition map and partition format as the source, on a Maxtor OneTouch external, FW 400 connected.

Issue:
The backup works fine, except that the Vintage OS 9 Get Info comments are lost.

I did a good bit of reading of this forum (back to its beginning) and experimentation a couple of days ago, and i realize that this is happening because the Desktop DB and Desktop DF folders are not copied over by SD!, and that this is a conscious decision to force a desktop rebuild when OS 9 is started, to avoid (unspecified) problems that OS 9 users have had in the past following a backup/restore where the volume names differ.
One of the forum posts, whose reference i have unfortunately lost, stated:

We do consciously not copy those OS9 files to cause the desktop to be rebuilt when starting up from a full copy. You can use the general steps in the "Excluding files and folders from a backup" to copy those files, though, if you'd like... just override our exclude by adding copies.

Well, i did just that, and indeed the Desktop DB and Desktop DF files copied over… nice and identical. Yet the Get Info comments still don’t show up when booted in OS 9. I can go into the Desktop DB file and look at them and they are right there… the Desktop DB file is byte-identical with the one on the source and the modification date exactly matches the source. Yet somehow it has become unlinked from the files.
I have verified that the desktop does not get rebuilt on OS 9 booting. I have tried this with a SD! erase and back up (with my altered script that copies over Desktop DB and Desktop DF) where both the target and destination volumes have identical names…*still the Desktop DB file is intact and unaltered, and still no Get Info comments on the copy when booted in OS 9 (and they are still happily there on the source, visible when OS 9 is running).

My questions:

1) How does a SD! user back up a Mac that has both OS X and OS 9 on the same partition and have everything in OS X work and also preserve the OS 9 Get Info comments (within OS 9…*i know about CommentConverter, thanks)? I don’t mind steps that involve a manual desktop rebuild, keeping the source and destination volume names the same, or other workarounds, though a solution avoiding those is even better. I don’t mind downgrading to an older SD! if necessary, as long as it works correctly with Tiger 10.4.11/PPC.

2) I’d like to read what Dave has to say about the history of the OS 9 problems that occurred when SD! (apparently) used to copy over Desktop DB and Desktop DF. What exactly went wrong? (I’m both curious and expecting it will help me understand what options are and are not available to deal with this situation.)

Thanks!

))Sonic((

[dnanian]

Well, as far as I know, OS9 file comments are in the Desktop DB (vs. .DS_Store under OSX). If you have modified the copy script to copy that, and it's unmodified (as I'm sure it would be), I don't know why the comments wouldn't be visible under OS9, since the involved files (once you changed the copy script) would be copied... especially if you've named the volumes the same. We certainly copy all the resource fork info, the files, the other metadata elements, etc.

Regarding why the Desktop DB isn't copied, as I recall (again, this is some time ago, and in a search of our internal database I can't find the exact info), the system wouldn't always start up properly under OS9 when the Desktop DB wasn't rebuilt, and not copying it was the recommended 'fix' (as opposed to forcing users to do it manually).

We haven't changed the way this stuff is copied for some time, so I don't think an earlier version of SuperDuper! will help, although you're welcome to try with v2.1.4, which you can download from the sidebar on the SuperDuper! page. But—and I hate to be discouraging here—given the fact that OS9 isn't available any more, and there are no current Macs that can even run it... and that we were always an OSX program and not a MacOS program, I can't say we've ever focused on OS9 support except as an extension of ensuring we're copying files properly.

[bigsnowdog]

Originally Posted by Sonic Purity

Yes, still in 2010 there are some of us running dual-boot OS 9/ OS X PPC Macs. I’m running into a problem with getting the OS 9 content to copy over correctly when using SD!

Setup (testing):

• G4 AGP 450 MHz running OS 10.4.11
• SD! 2.6.2 (v87) run from the internal HD.
• Source hard drive for testing: External FW 400 attached, Apple Partition Map, single Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) partition with both OS X and OS 9 and their contents installed on that one partition
• Destination hard drive: same partition map and partition format as the source, on a Maxtor OneTouch external, FW 400 connected.

Issue:
The backup works fine, except that the Vintage OS 9 Get Info comments are lost.

I did a good bit of reading of this forum (back to its beginning) and experimentation a couple of days ago, and i realize that this is happening because the Desktop DB and Desktop DF folders are not copied over by SD!, and that this is a conscious decision to force a desktop rebuild when OS 9 is started, to avoid (unspecified) problems that OS 9 users have had in the past following a backup/restore where the volume names differ.
One of the forum posts, whose reference i have unfortunately lost, stated:



Well, i did just that, and indeed the Desktop DB and Desktop DF files copied over… nice and identical. Yet the Get Info comments still don’t show up when booted in OS 9. I can go into the Desktop DB file and look at them and they are right there… the Desktop DB file is byte-identical with the one on the source and the modification date exactly matches the source. Yet somehow it has become unlinked from the files.
I have verified that the desktop does not get rebuilt on OS 9 booting. I have tried this with a SD! erase and back up (with my altered script that copies over Desktop DB and Desktop DF) where both the target and destination volumes have identical names…*still the Desktop DB file is intact and unaltered, and still no Get Info comments on the copy when booted in OS 9 (and they are still happily there on the source, visible when OS 9 is running).

My questions:

1) How does a SD! user back up a Mac that has both OS X and OS 9 on the same partition and have everything in OS X work and also preserve the OS 9 Get Info comments (within OS 9…*i know about CommentConverter, thanks)? I don’t mind steps that involve a manual desktop rebuild, keeping the source and destination volume names the same, or other workarounds, though a solution avoiding those is even better. I don’t mind downgrading to an older SD! if necessary, as long as it works correctly with Tiger 10.4.11/PPC.

2) I’d like to read what Dave has to say about the history of the OS 9 problems that occurred when SD! (apparently) used to copy over Desktop DB and Desktop DF. What exactly went wrong? (I’m both curious and expecting it will help me understand what options are and are not available to deal with this situation.)

Thanks!

))Sonic((

Count me among those still running dual OS G4 Macs....

[sjk]

Your brief "me, too" reply was overwhelmed by the quoted text.

[Sonic Purity]

Thanks Dave and everyone for contributing. I’ve done a lot of testing and reading about this on and off over the past few weeks. Below are my findings.

Originally Posted by dnanian

Well, as far as I know, OS9 file comments are in the Desktop DB (vs. .DS_Store under OSX). If you have modified the copy script to copy that, and it's unmodified (as I'm sure it would be), I don't know why the comments wouldn't be visible under OS9, since the involved files (once you changed the copy script) would be copied... especially if you've named the volumes the same. We certainly copy all the resource fork info, the files, the other metadata elements, etc.

Reading and testing indicates that there are things that the File Manager does when files are moved that cannot be replicated by just copying over Desktop DB (and DF). I did that with SD!, CarbonCopyCloner 3.x, and manually, and in all cases the Get Info comments were not visible. They were right there in the Desktop DB file, yet no longer linked to their corresponding files in a way that the OS 9 Finder would display them. Even letting OS 9 rebuild those desktop files in the new location didn’t help: comments still in Desktop DB, yet not visible in the OS 9 Finder.

Regarding why the Desktop DB isn't copied, as I recall (again, this is some time ago, and in a search of our internal database I can't find the exact info), the system wouldn't always start up properly under OS9 when the Desktop DB wasn't rebuilt, and not copying it was the recommended 'fix' (as opposed to forcing users to do it manually).

Thanks for checking. I did not find any particular issues when the desktop files were copied over, yet as i was tightly focused on the Get Info comments, i could easily have missed some things.

We haven't changed the way this stuff is copied for some time, so I don't think an earlier version of SuperDuper! will help, although you're welcome to try with v2.1.4, which you can download from the sidebar on the SuperDuper! page. But—and I hate to be discouraging here—given the fact that OS9 isn't available any more, and there are no current Macs that can even run it... and that we were always an OSX program and not a MacOS program, I can't say we've ever focused on OS9 support except as an extension of ensuring we're copying files properly.

It gets even worse: even the OS X 10.4.11 Finder itself, doing normal Finder copying, does Not preserve OS 9 Get Info comments.

The only way the comments are preserved:

• OS 9 Finder copying
• (from memory) OS 9 backup utilities (Retrospect 5 is one that does)

There do exist File Manager calls for working with the Get Info comments, and i guess the Vintage OS backup utilities must have been using some parts of the File Manager to keep the Desktop file structures working on the backup and restorations from backup, yet as i am not a programmer i don’t know much more than this.

The other interesting tidbit is that at least through Leopard there continued/continues to exist in OS X some Classic code related to the Desktop DB:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SKPlugins/DesktopDB.service

I could not find any information on this service other than a lot of WWW posts about people with Intel Macs wondering why it exists. I found nothing on Apple’s Developer site… yet again, i’m not a developer, so i may not have known where all to look. I did look inside this DesktopDB.service file with BBEdit, and did see the same File Manager calls for working with comments and other aspects of Desktop DB as discussed in the older Apple documentation for the File Manager. It appears that this file and others in that folder, all Classic code, exist to support older Carbon-based software. Whether or not this file could be used by a skilled programmer to cure the missing Get Info comments issue i do not know.

Basically, i’m giving up. I was looking into this for a friend/client who is only in 2009-2010 making the move from OS 9 to OS X (on a G3 Pismo, 10.4.11… works pretty well). He says he doesn’t have that many Get Info comments, so this issue won’t kill him (and i’ve suggested he use CommentConverter so at least the comments will get copied over to be visible in OS X’s Finder Get Info and preserved by SD! during backups). It would kill me, yet i maintain a wholly separate OS 9 Mac (several, actually) for avoiding just this sort of issue.

Thanks again, Dave, for looking into this. I totally understand that this was never a priority for SD!, and there is little reason for it to become so at this late date. Still, if anyone reading this figures something out, those of us who live on in a dual Vintage and X Mac OS world will greatly appreciate any fixes/workarounds! The only workaround i know is having OS 9 content on a separate volume and backing up that volume with OS 9 backup software that preserves the comments. All well and good, yet not for people like my friend/client who need access to one copy of files in both 9 and X as they learn X and gradually move over (remember those days?).

))Sonic((

[dnanian]

Thanks for all that additional information & research, Sonic.