I recently had to (hurriedly) back up data on an older Macbook before migrating it to a new one. Since all I had at my disposal was a large FAT32 formatted drive, I used that and a manual copy. I've since used rsync to put it back on a (non-journaled) HFS+ drive (under Ubuntu).
Now most of the files have a corresponding ._ file alongside them. I understand that this is how OS X stores extended attributes and other information on non-HFS+ filesystems. So my question is: now that I have these files back on a HFS+ filesystem, how can I reconcile the information in the ._ files? That is, since the data in those files can now be stored in the HFS+ metadata for each file, how do I put it back?
Best Answer
You can copy the files using Finder. It seems Finder can reconcile these when copying from a partition type that doesn't support extended metadata to a partition type that does, reversing it's procedure for doing the reverse and creating the dotfiles.