Nekochan Net

I recently had to restore from a DDS3 backup after a striped disk failed and when I was done I noticed that a bunch of my mac programs were now just documents that I could not run.
They were still the same size but I guess the attribute that told the system what specific type of file it was was somehow lost.
Is there any way to reset that attribute or tell the system to run it anyways?

_________________


<-------- A very happy forum member.

Could you give as a clue as to what operating system, what file system, what backup format and software you used etc?

Mac files have three separate sets of information

1. data fork - like a traditional DOS or UNIX file

2. resource fork - a database of resources held as a single stream

3. finder information - holds the "type" and "creator" of the file, eg type APPL are applications.

Depending on the way you did your backup you may not have restored all three components.

_________________
4xRS6K 2xHP9K 6xSUN 1xDEC 14xMAC 7xPC 2xPS2

It was a bog standard NTFS backup done using the backup program that came with Windows 2000 server. I kinda blame myself actually for not stuffing the files. I find they preserve a lot better.
The restore was done using the same program.

_________________


<-------- A very happy forum member.

In what way are they macintosh files?

I use Win2k server "Services For Macintosh" to provide appleshare directories, these then use NTFS streams to store the finder and resource information. If it knows how to do NTFS streams it should have saved recovered the files correctly.

I also have a binhex/unbinhex pair of programs that work on NTFS.

_________________
4xRS6K 2xHP9K 6xSUN 1xDEC 14xMAC 7xPC 2xPS2

How are they mac files?
Normally, if you are running a mac and you click on the program the installer for said program starts and the installer does the rest.
If it does help, I do have ResEdit.
Yes, I had the server running so that it handled mac files properly however I have gotten the odd hiccup once or twice where the mac suddenly forgot what several JPEG files were and I had to manually open them by first opening Picture Viewer before it remembered that they were images.

_________________


<-------- A very happy forum member.

How are they shared, using AppleShare or SMB?

_________________
4xRS6K 2xHP9K 6xSUN 1xDEC 14xMAC 7xPC 2xPS2

If you open them with ResEdit do they still have their resources? Perhaps they just lost their Creator and file type.

I don't remember how Services for Macintosh works. I know it uses ntfs streams for the resource fork, does it keep a database similar to the "Desktop" database somewhere? or another stream for the creator, type and other attributes?

If the file type was lost you could use my favorite, FileTyper to make a droppable type changer (DropType? can't remember what it calls them) to drag your apps onto and change the type back.

_________________
<--challenge S

It uses a stream called "AFP_AfpInfo" for the attributes.

_________________
4xRS6K 2xHP9K 6xSUN 1xDEC 14xMAC 7xPC 2xPS2

Yes, I use Appletalk to connect my macs to the server.
Anyways, I tried opening it with ResEdit and it tells me it has no resource fork and opening it will create one.
So it looks like at least the resource fork is all messed up.

_________________


<-------- A very happy forum member.

More likely it's been zapped. This happens when the file gets handled by anything which isn't aware of forks. Are you sure whatever you used to archive to tape is fork savvy?

There's no way to recover from it, sadly. Basically half the file's gone.

Damn. Well, I guess I'll have to either hope that I backed it up elsewhere or I still have it on one of my other mac hard drives.

_________________


<-------- A very happy forum member.