Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Copy "colored" Finder entries with rsync

I do like the simple feature of the Mac OS Finder that allows you to mark files/directories with specific colors. After doing a backup a while ago using rsync, I later noticed the color marks weren't copied to the destination.

Well, the solution is simple:
Turns out that Finder stores the color-rules in extended attributes (xattrs) of the filesystem. So to copy those, you need to call rsync with the option "-xattrs".

Info: Not all versions of rsync support "-xattrs". You might have to get an updated version of rsync via macports. I used version 3.0.8