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Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / April 2008OS X: Resource fork, Rsync and Eudora 6.2.4
I'm having problems that sound like the "resource fork" problem mentioned earlier. I have been using Eudora for about 12 years and moved mailboxes 6 or 7 times, but this time it didn't work. What I did was: 1. Backup all my HDD using a command-line rsync, including 3.7gb of Eudora 6.1.1 (paid mode) mailboxes 2. Watch my HDD crash 3. Move the Eudora files back to my new HDD using rsync 4. Notice that Eudora 6.1.1 doesn't launch on my MacBook Air, so install 6.2.4 5. What I see is: a. error message "not a properly formatted mailbox" for In, Out, Junk etc. b. my custom mailboxes don't show up in the menu, and c. the settings (e.g. e-mail accounts are also lost). So the problem could be the rsync, the 6.1.1 -> 6.2.4, or the PowerPC to Intel transition. I opened up the mailboxes in a text editor, and they look like standard *nix text file mailboxes. Any suggestions on what to try? I don't want to abandon my mailboxes and 10+ email accounts, and of course don't want to lose any data Joel West On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:23:21 -0500, Joel West wrote: > I'm having problems that sound like the "resource fork" problem > mentioned earlier. I have been using Eudora for about 12 years and > moved mailboxes 6 or 7 times, but this time it didn't work. > What I did was: > 1. Backup all my HDD using a command-line rsync, including 3.7gb of [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > Any suggestions on what to try? I don't want to abandon my mailboxes > and 10+ email accounts, and of course don't want to lose any data [assume a suitable tune playing :] "Got no rsync, got no Mac, all I do is to read the flak" :) A history of rsync on Mac OS X [December 4, 2007] http://patternbuffer.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/a-history-of-rsync-on-mac-os-x/ "I got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night" [composer: Irving Berlin, show: Annie Get Your Gun] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3ZcmIZz1as [Reba McEntire!] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fbgzk6gvkg [Barbara Cook] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odol-YtN9S0 [new talent] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Got_the_Sun_in_the_Mornin'_(and_the_Moon_at_Night) In article <7298c66d-2f9d-41c0-af78-51c7588ef306@13g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>, > I'm having problems that sound like the "resource fork" problem > mentioned earlier. I have been using Eudora for about 12 years and [quoted text clipped - 23 lines] > > Joel West Sounds like you are moving from one Mac to the other? Why not try this: .zip your whole "Eudora Folder" on the PowerPC mac. Transfer the .zip file (maybe using rsync?) Unzip it on the Air. See if it works that way? I've not used rsync to move Eudora mailboxes (and usually just copy the folder directly to an external hard disk when moving them back/forth between machines), so I can't say if something about rsync isn't respecting something. - Steve In article <7298c66d-2f9d-41c0-af78-51c7588ef306@13g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>, > I'm having problems that sound like the "resource fork" problem > mentioned earlier. I have been using Eudora for about 12 years and [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > 1. Backup all my HDD using a command-line rsync, including 3.7gb of > Eudora 6.1.1 (paid mode) mailboxes What OS version? Which version/build of rsync? What command line flags? It has mostly been unsafe to use rsync as a backup tool on MacOS X because the version shipped by Apple prior to Tiger completely ignored resource forks (as did the open source base) and Apple's variant had some more subtle problems until about a year ago. *In general* rsync is a risky choice as a backup tool. It is great for what it is designed for (synchronizing big files with small changes across slow links) but it has a known edge case where the target can end up mangled if the source changes mid-sync. If you used rsync to back up those mailboxes while Eudora was running, there's a significant chance that the data in them got mangled, instead of just having the resource fork dropped. > 2. Watch my HDD crash That's always bad... If you still have the old disk accessible, it might be possible to salvage some data even if the disk will not mount. If you can get 'dd' to read any data from the raw device node, you might be able to use it to dump what can be read from the disk to someplace where you can treat it like a logically mangled disk image that needs repair. I've done that successfully, and while it is a major chore requiring patience and lot of free disk space, it can be worthwhile if you have no good backup. > 3. Move the Eudora files back to my new HDD using rsync > 4. Notice that Eudora 6.1.1 doesn't launch on my MacBook Air, so [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > So the problem could be the rsync, the 6.1.1 -> 6.2.4, or the PowerPC > to Intel transition. Indeed. If there was a OS version change involved as well, it could also be related. > I opened up the mailboxes in a text editor, and they look like > standard *nix text file mailboxes. > > Any suggestions on what to try? I don't want to abandon my mailboxes > and 10+ email accounts, and of course don't want to lose any data It sounds like you have already lost your settings. The "Eudora Settings" file has *only* a resource fork, so if you backed it up using a version of rsync (or command line flags) that ignored resource forks, you never backed it up. You will probably need to re-enter the account settings and other options by hand unless you have some better sort of backup. The mailboxes are almost certainly recoverable, but the lack of resource forks is probably confusing Eudora and will mean that any meta-data that isn't discoverable from the messages (i.e. read/unread/replied status) is lost. The Eudora mailboxes are not actually identical to any other variant of the traditional mbox format, since they have these oddities: 1. All linebreaks are bare carriage returns 2. The message-delimiter "From " lines all use '???@???' in the sender address part. Assuming the mailboxes you have are not internally damaged, it should be possible to cause Eudora to recognize a file as a mailbox and reconstruct a sane resource fork TOC from the contents by setting the type and creator for the file before you try to open it with Eudora. The easiest command-line way to do this is with the SetFile tool that is part of the Apple Developer Tools package: /Developer/Tools/SetFile -c CSOm -t TEXT filename  SignatureNow where did I hide that website... > > 2. Watch my HDD crash > [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > successfully, and while it is a major chore requiring patience and lot > of free disk space, it can be worthwhile if you have no good backup. dd is good, but a bit manual. ddrescue automates some of the repetitive parts of copying a damaged disk and works well. (Yes, I used it over a period of about 3 months to recover more than 90% of my files from a crashed disk. It can take a long time, but it may be worth it.) http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html Note that dd_rescue was an early attempt to do the same thing, but is nowhere near as developed as ddrescue. Cheers DAvid > > > 2. Watch my HDD crash > > [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > Note that dd_rescue was an early attempt to do the same thing, but is > nowhere near as developed as ddrescue. Just using dd with the right args (conv=noerror,sync if I recall correctly) did the trick for me without much hassle, and in combination with fsck_hfs got me back over 95% of the files on a nearly-full 30GB disk back in 2003. It took about 2 days start to finish and was mostly a matter of waiting for dd to give up on the really bad blocks, not actually doing anything. SignatureNow where did I hide that website... > Just using dd with the right args (conv=noerror,sync if I recall > correctly) did the trick for me without much hassle, and in combination > with fsck_hfs got me back over 95% of the files on a nearly-full 30GB > disk back in 2003. It took about 2 days start to finish and was mostly a > matter of waiting for dd to give up on the really bad blocks, not > actually doing anything. Where ddrescue helps is that it starts off copying large chunks, so as to copy the disk as quickly as possible before it fails totally. After it has got through the entire disk, skipping the bits with errors, it goes back and starts again on the skipped bits reading a block at a time until it hits the bad block(s). Then it goes to the end of the skipped section and starts reading backwards until it hits the bad blocks. It then goes on to the next skipped section and repeats the process. The idea is to maximise the number of blocks retrieved. Cheers David |
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