Q: from Case-Sensitive Journaled HFS+ to NON Case-Sensitive Journaled HFS+

This is a hard thing to deal with globally. The basic problem is a "collision in the name space." Basically, this means that with case sensitive file systems you could have two different files in the same directory with names like "File 1" & "file 1" but in case insensitive ones you could not, since both files would have the same name because the case of filename characters is ignored. Since two files with the same path name is not allowed, these utilities won't let you restore a case sensitive file system to one that is not.

I'm not sure this will work, but you might try erasing one of the drives, formatting it for Journaled HFS+, & installing Snow Leopard on it from the DVD. When it restarts, use the Setup/Migration Assistant to try to migrate files from the other drive. You will need to make sure that you do not have any files on the migration source that would cause a namespace collision before doing this.

but to my surprise the new HDD is reformatted?? after D U had done his job. Same thing with CCC.

Not reformatted, but likely just SuperDuper!, or in your case, Carbon Copy Cloner, doing what they're supposed. Creating an exact clone of the source drive. That the new drive "changed" from non case sensitive to case sensitive after cloning, then that information must be data on the drive. Possibly in the file table.

When you clone a volume on a HD, you get a +functionally identical+ copy of it. (There are some differences among how Disk Utility, CCC, & SuperDuper! do this, but they are not important here & mostly have to do with if the cloning "engine" does block or file copies & if the utility unnecessarily copies temporary files that would be deleted on startup anyway.)

Because the file system is inherently a part of the volume's functionality, it is preserved during the cloning process. (Technically, the file system itself is a set of files describing where the other files are located & other info about them. It must be preserved or there would be no way of telling which blocks of data belong to what files.)

I don't know of any way to find file namespace case conflicts other than by searching for them manually; however, I doubt that any system-created files would create them. This at least limits the search to user & possibly (but unlikely) application created files. If it were me, I would either try the Setup/Migration Assistant approach, or maybe just a manual migration. The manual method should object to any case conflicts so you could take notes about any files that need name changes & deal with them after the non-conflicting files are copied.

There aren't any namespace clashes, because with a case-sensitive filesystem you can have both "File" and "file" - it's going the other way that is a problem. So you won't have lost anything. The problem is that a whole bunch of (badly written) apps get quite confused, becuase their scripts and programs refer to each other with the wrong capitalisation - on an insensitive system, /applications/program will work, but on a sensitive one it must be /Applications/Programname. MS Office partially breaks, several Adobe products (PS won't even install!), that sort of thing.

You can't convert the filesystem in place, I don't believe.

What you can do is create a Time Machine backup, reformat and reinstall your disk, then restore from the Time Machine backup at the end of the installation.

This will restore all your files, and will give you a case-insensitive system. Everything should just work.

JaimieV wrote:
There aren't any namespace clashes, because with a case-sensitive filesystem you can have both "File" and "file" - it's going the other way that is a problem.

He is trying to go the other way. That's the problem.

What you can do is create a Time Machine backup, reformat and reinstall your disk, then restore from the Time Machine backup at the end of the installation.

How would this resolve any existing namespace conflicts in the restored items?

No he's not - from the top, "I have formatted my hard drive to Case-Sensitive Journaled HFS+".

Yes, but what he wants is to restore the startup disk to be non Case-Sensitive.

Doh! Okay, I see what you mean. Sorry. I was only thinking of the files that OSX and applications had placed on the system during installation, not any potential files created afterwards with possible clashes. Thanks for beating me into shape.

I guess the point is that he needs to go to a non-sensitive filesystem anyway, so any potential damage is worth risking... any clashing files created by apps (rather than by the user choosing document names, I mean) will already be breaking the application in question. Eg, if an application writes to the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.app.AppName.plist, but only reads from the file com.app.appname.plist, then it's already broken so it doesn't matter if there's clash.

If the user has ~/Document/My File.doc and also ~/Document/My file.doc, then one of them will have already been overwritten by the other on the TM backup, which is non-case-sensitive...

Looks like a manual problem to me, I can't see an automated fix.

Keep in mind that the file system will not allow a namespace conflict to 'break' a file -- it may overwrite one with another of the same name (& depending on the circumstances ask permission to do that first) but that's all that will happen.

Personally, on the balance of risk, I would go ahead and do the restore from the Time Machine.

Remember that you can always choose to keep the TM archive, so you can retrieve anything from it that you later discover missing.

*Case-Sensitive TimeMachine Volume*

Time-Machine will force the same case-sensitiveness setting on the backup volume as the drive you are backing up. So if your main drive is case-sensitive, when you are first creating Time Machine backup one of two things will happen:

1. If the drive is local to your Mac, Time Machine will reformat the partition to be case-sensitive

2. If the drive is on a network (ex. Airport Express) and it was formatted as case-insensitive, Time Machine will create a sparse disk image (a virtual drive) which will be case-sensitive.

It is impossible for a case-sensitive file system to be backup to a case-insensitive drive, thus Time Machine does enforce this compatibility. I am not sure if it enforces it in the opposite direction, but I believe it should too.

*Restore to a case-insensitive volume*

I have read about others restoring from case-sensitive TimeMachine backup to a case-insensitive new partition, and apparently this works, but you will get restore errors whenever filename conflicts occur, in which case I have no idea which version of the file gets restored.

*Finding Potential Case-Insensitive Conflicts*

Being faced with same problem as plox, I've been looking for a way to scan my case-sensitive file system for potential conflicts. I even put together a script that attempts to do that, but there are files under Snow Leopard whose filenames contain unicode characters, and my script horribly fails when it encounters those.

Marcin wrote:

Time-Machine will force the same case-sensitiveness setting on the backup volume as the drive you are backing up. So if your main drive is case-sensitive, when you are first creating Time Machine backup one of two things will happen:

No, it won't. It defaults to case-sensitive, regardless of the sensitivity of your internal HD.

If your internal HD is case-ignorant, you can back up to either case-sensitive or case-ignorant.

If your internal HD is case-sensitive, you can only back-up to case-sensitive, but Time Machine won't erase and reformat the drive -- it will just fail.

Only if a drive is not formatted HFS+ will Time Machine reformat it.

*Restore to a case-insensitive volume*

I have read about others restoring from case-sensitive TimeMachine backup to a case-insensitive new partition, and apparently this works, but you will get restore errors whenever filename conflicts occur, in which case I have no idea which version of the file gets restored.

Neither. You get a generic "conflict" message, that doesn't even list the names:
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See the pink box in #5 of Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for details.