[plug] FireWire Hard Drive Question

[James Devenish]

In message <411DEC3D.4090705 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 06:41:01PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Be aware that working with HFS/HFS+ volumes under OSes that don't 
> understand resource forks can be a bit ... "interesting". Doing the 
> wrong thing can result in corrupted files.

Apparently, HFS+ supports arbitrary "forks" (is that somewhat like NTFS
streams?), but Mac OS only provides an API for resource forks (not
arbitrary forks). With Mac OS X, Apple has deprecated the use of
resource forks, so if Brock is starting from scratch then I guess he
won't have much of a problem.

> If all you want to do is store collections of files (using the disk for 
> transferring things around), I'd probably go for FAT32. MacOS X will 
> handle its lack of resource fork support by creating ._$FILENAME files 
> to store the resource data, so you'll be able to store data that 
> requires resource forks on the disk. Be aware that OS/X does _NOT_ store 
> the finder info (as the NetATalk people are eternally cursing them for) 
> on the disk, so you can run into interesting problems with aliases and 
> running applications from the disk.

While I don't doubt what you're saying, I was under the impression that
the format that Apple uses for those ._$FILENAME files at least includes
fields for persistent IDs (implying that aliases would keep working).
Also, Finder preferences are stored in the infernal .DS_Store files, so
I imagine it can get by without that aspect of HFS metadata too. So,
your recommendation of FAT32 might be better than you suspect.
Obviously, Apple has had to think through this sort of stuff lately.