A number of people seemed to enjoy my coverage of how poorly most Mac archiving programs work with Mac/HFS+ metadata. However, a number of people also thought that I might have tested incorrectly (it’s possible!) and wanted to know how other sorts of utilities (such as file synchronization programs) handled Mac files.

In order to help everyone find out which systems work best of all, I put together a little disk image containing a handful of small test files which include every sort of metadata I could think of (including ACLs, extended attributes, resource forks, file type/creator codes, BSD flags, comments, labels, and more!). I also included detailed instructions on how to validate copies of these files after they’ve been through a given process of archiving and restoration or whatnot.

I hope this is useful to the Mac community at large so that we can improve the programs already in place and easier manage the wealth of metadata available to us, despite the fact that its inner workings are usually hidden.