A Caveat on Bittorrent Sync: I haven't tested thoroughly enough to say with certainty, but my experience is that tags are retained with syncing between macs, however, if you sync with an android device tags are lost. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the BTSync android client, or if it's inherent to the android filesystem, so I'm not sure if that will be possible to fix.
[mlBackup](https://github.com/MacLemon... which uses Rsync, preserves tags, and is awesome by the way.
Attic should too, according to its [FAQ](https://attic-backup.org/fa... but I haven't had time to play with myself yet.
I'm holding my breath.
[mlBackup](https://github.com/MacLemon... which uses Rsync, preserves tags.
Attic should too, according to its [FAQ](https://attic-backup.org/fa... but I haven't had time to play with myself yet.
I'm holding my breath.
Box.com (or box.net or whatever) doesn't preserve tags on a restore (or when syncing between computers). Box has it's own tagging system, but those tags are only visible in the web interface. I have Box at work, and the missing tag sync is the reason I haven't been able to go all in on tagging on OSX.
I just made a test with CrashPlan:
In CrashPlan you have two ways to restore data:
A) Via website -> download a zip archive with the restored data or
B) Via the CrashPlan app -> restore directly to the Desktop (or any other location)
In case A) the tags are lost (I guess they are using a zip implementation that is unaware of extended attributes). In case B) the tags have been restored correctly.
An extra hint for CrashPlan users:
CrashPlan in general is behaving very well with OSX and HFS features: For example if you quickly want to exclude a file/folder from backup you simply set the “com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem com.apple.backupd” extended attribute. (This is the same attribute used by the OS to exclude files/folders from Time Machine backups.)
I’ve set up an Automator action to do this and it’s extremely handy because it allows me to exclude/include folders on the fly without opening the CrashPlan app and manipulating the inclusion/exclusion list.
I couldn't repeat that Ruby FileUtils :preserve thing... I think I've misinterpreted something when copying and moving stuff around. But in any case, Python's shutils seems to work in a similar manner to Ruby's FileUtils (when there's no Coreutils installed): move preserves tags, copy loses tags.
Back when they brought Spotlight to OS X, there was this metadata field I tried to use (I was also new to OS X at that time). I soon noticed I lost my metadata when moving files around, etc. I still have this same suspicion about these Mavericks tags, I may lose important information if I move files to some mounted USB sticks or mounted filesystems, etc, and don't realise what I'm doing.
Remarkbox