Subject: Re: Apple Double?
From: Joerg Bullmann (jb@glink.net.hk)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2000 - 05:58:46 EDT
Hi Bill and all,
My god, I half got a heart attack reading this
thread!!!!!! Guys, be very very careful!
DO NOT DELETE .APPLEDOUBLE STUFF
It is totally up to the applications what they
store in the resource fork (RF) and what in the
data fork (DF). And the RF is stored in .AppleDouble
files.
Bill, you are lucky that you only "cleaned up"
HTML's, JPG's, and a few GIF's. In those files,
usually nothing "important" is stored in the RF.
In text files you e.g. have the scroll and cursor
position. Photoshop adds custom icons (thumbnail
pix) and stuff like that.
But there are files that contain almost all their
contents or big parts it in the RF. Had it been
files like that, you would have been stuck
with mutilated and useless file carcasses. ;-|
Applications for example totally break if you
remove their R.
Look at it a bit like this; "I'll truncate all
files I have to multiples of 4096 so they fill
my hard disk more efficiently". You wouldn't do
that either.
I would recommend to not touch, change or remove
the .AppleDouble pendants of the files on netatalk
volumes. Resource data is "data" as well and noone
should assume it is redundant stuff.
Admittedly there are situations, where you want to
clean up stuff and dance with the big broom through
parts of your file systems. Do it with utmost care
though. TEXT, GIF, JPEG, and file formats that "live"
on the web (i.e. can be viewed directly through web
browsers) are usually safe, because browsers and
web servers don't know RF's.
In any case, do some testing first!
In general developers tend to move away from storing
stuff in the RF, probably for cross platform compati-
bility reasons (e.g. Macromedia's Dreamweaver project
files can be directly interchanged between Windows
and Mac; they only could this get this to work by
not using the Mac's RF because there are no RF's in
Windows). But I wouldn't let this tendency make me
go careless...
I hope I didn't miss anything, and I also didn't
want to sound LOUD. But we're talking really
dangerous stuff here, and I haven't read anything
in this thread that made my point explicitly enough:
*GENERAL* rule is not that you *should*
keep the RF of the files but that you
*MUST KEEP IT*.
Others please correct me. It might be a bit on the
dogmatic side, but I hope this saves the odd hour
restoring broken files... ;-)
Joerg
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