System Sunday

I’ll be spending quite a bit of time today rebuilding my system. I’m hoping that many of my problems that I’ve had with Mac OS X Leopard so far are related to doing a system upgrade rather than a clean install.

== Update ==

Clean install of Leopard went without a hitch. Time Machine is fairly useful, though I did hit some snags. Since I didn’t back up my entire hard drive I wasn’t able to use the restore option that is given to you with migration assistant. I turned to the trusty cp command, but I ran into permissions trouble on my first attempt when I used the -p option to try and preserve all the file attributes (permissions, ctime, atime, mtime, etc). All the files copied over just fine but I believe that there were some ACLs that were mucking up my system.

Since I hadn’t explicitly put any ACLs on my files, I’m left wondering what part of the system decided to append them. It’s just idle speculation however, since I immediately blasted the ACLs off the misbehaving directories rather than dig deeper into the problem.

== Time Machine ==

After reinstalling Leopard, while I was getting things squared away, I noticed that Time Machine nuked all my Time Machine snapshots.

Nice.

Time Machine takes permissions changes into account when comparing files, so be careful if you start doing mass stamping with tools like Xstamp or changing the group ownership. Time Machine will go ahead and start eating up older snapshots if your backup drive isn’t large enough.