Dijji
Copying files to other drive with rsync ignores custom metadata
I installed FileMeta and am using it to manage tags for png images and similar files; it's been working great. I noticed however than when I use rsync to copy files with custom metadata to another drive, custom tags are lost on the receiving end. rsync seems to notice that the metadata has been changed and performs the copy, but the new tags do not appear on the other side.
I don't have this issue with files such as jpegs that natively support tags and other metadata, and it works fine if I manually copy the file or tag it myself. Worst case scenario, I can automatically export the metadata from the source drive on each backup and reapply it to the destination drive after copying; I'd just like to avoid this if possible.
For reference, I am running 64-bit Windows 10 (and the appropriate version of FileMeta) and using rsync through Cygwin. Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for creating this awesome tool!
To copy NTFS files correctly, whatever does the copying must recognise that an NTFS file can contain multiple streams. If only the main (default) stream is copied, then meta data that is not held in the main body of the file will be lost.
In the case of UNIX, as far as I know, all terminal stream sources and sinks support only single streams. The command line utilities support splitting and merging multiple streams, but only in flight, with operations like duplicate and concatenate.
So it makes sense that if you copy using a UNIX utility, you are only going to copy the main stream. To copy correctly, you need to use a utility that supports NTFS multiple stream files.
Dijji
