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Hi all,
I have used rsync to backup my files from an iMac, and this iMac is gone.
Now, I moved all the backups to my new iMac.
I found that all the softlinks become binary files and are not working properly as a link.
more link_file gives:
"evt_a.fits" may be a binary file. See it anyway?
IntxLNK^"symbols....."
Is there any way to recover all these links?
Thank you very much in advance!
OS X Mavericks (10.9)
How did you run rsync? And by soft links do you mean symbolic links?
I didn't remmeber how I ran the rsync, may be rsync -a??? or with some other flags.
Yes, I meant symbolic links. Now, all the symbolic links become actual files.
When I type "ln -l", it becomes something like this:
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 username staff 132 Jun 22 2012 link_name
When I type "ln -l", it becomes something like this:
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 username staff 132 Jun 22 2012 link_name
Then, no. You cannot easily recover the symlinks
At best you can either try to match up the file names with the original files and recreate the symlinks, or use a utility such as 'cmp' or maybe 'cksum' to figure out if 2 files are identical, and then replace one with a symlink to the other.
But this is all very manual, and subject to errors. Also if any of the symlinks were to directories, then you will have lots of real files under the directory and figuring out that you ONLY need to keep a symlink to the directory is a lot more owrk.
Next time you may want to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to do this which will use rsync, but with all the desired Mac options (CCC can be used to copy a select set of files or subdirectories, and not just dup the entire disk; CCC is very flexible).
How did you recover the files to the new Mac?
I copied the data from old iMac to an external hard drive using rsync, and then copied from the hard drive to the new iMac.
Depending on the age of the iMac, there is no guarantee that the links are valid anymore.
KWQuestion wrote:
I copied the data from old iMac to an external hard drive using rsync, and then copied from the hard drive to the new iMac.
But how did you copy from the drive to the Mac? cp, tar, Finder, rsync, other?
How to recover soft links from a backup?
