Unix executable file- in backup email files

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Unix executable file- in backup email files

Hello,

I've searched the discussions and found a few posts that resemble my question but nothing exactly/ nothing suggested has worked so far.

I have entire email files backed up to a LaCie drive- 2 actually. All of the email backup icons have been changed to "Unix executable file"- the icon is a grey box with "exec" on it.

The promising side is that the files are still large- 301 mgs, etc- so I would think there is still information in the file.

I've tried going into "Info" and changing "open with" to entourage or thunderbird. Or even Excel to see if I could get a tab delimited file and convert. Nothing has worked so far.

I've seen this before with other types of backup files as well. I haven't changed operating systems, have only been working on Macs, this has happened both on a wireless ethernet disk and a firewire drive.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

jz

powerbook g4, Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Jan 9, 2007 10:26 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 9, 2007 10:42 AM in response to jzzz

Hello,

What sort of email files are these? You might just need to reset type/creator info.

--
Cole

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Answer 2

jzzz Author

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Jan 9, 2007 12:38 PM in response to Cole Tierney

Thanks for responding. The files are the entire folders from various email programs that I've used at different times- Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook. Note these are all different folders, in different places, but the same thing has happened to all of them. I followed the instructions the individual program describes to backup and have successfully backed them up before.

How do I reset type/ creator info? I've tried changing "open with" in info but this didn't work.

Thanks again!

jz

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Answer 3

Jan 9, 2007 12:50 PM in response to jzzz

I can't speak for the others, but Eudora appears to save the actual mail in the file's data fork. If you have developer tools installed, you can use the SetFile utility to change type and creator codes. For Eudora mboxes:
SetFile -t 'TEXT' -c 'CSOm' your_mbox

--
Cole

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Answer 4

Brett_X

Level 2

210 points

Jan 9, 2007 3:04 PM in response to jzzz

It sounds like you're losing the resource forks of the files. The resource fork is a section of the file that the Mac uses to store the type/creator of the file.

1) What are you using to back up the files? Some utilities (especially old command line utilities) are notorious for not saving resource forks.

2) What format is the hard drive? If it is formatted for Windows (Fat32), I'm pretty sure you will lose resource forks when you copy files to it.

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Answer 5

Jan 9, 2007 3:29 PM in response to Brett_X

Creator and type data are actually saved with the file's HFS+ meta data. This info would also be lost having been saved on Fat32 file system.

--
Cole

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Answer 6

jzzz Author

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Jan 11, 2007 2:33 PM in response to Cole Tierney

sorry i disappeared- i'm pretty good with computers but your responses made me afraid i could be in over my head.

the drives are formatted macintosh pc exchange. i just used drag and drop to back them up.

i downloaded web objects developer- am i on the right track?

sorry if this is a bother. i went to the apple store to get help but the guy had no clue.

thanks!

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Answer 7

Jan 11, 2007 3:54 PM in response to jzzz

Hi,

Never fear! Your original MacOS disks should include the developer tools. They call it xcode these days. By default it should install extra command line utilities in /Developer/Tools. So really the command should look like:
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -t 'TEXT' -c 'CSOm' your_mbox

You can add /Developer/Tools to your $PATH variable to avoid the extra typing. But you can do that later. Just replace your_mbox with the path to one of your Eudora mail boxes that you've copied back to your harddrive.
--
Cole

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Answer 8

Brett_X

Level 2

210 points

Jan 18, 2007 5:27 AM in response to jzzz

If your purpose is to use the current backup, you can do as Cole suggests. But if you just want to know what to do from this point on (and don't need to use the backup), I would repartition the drive and format it HFS+. That way you won't run into this problem again.

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Answer 9

maxfiep

Level 1

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Mar 26, 2007 9:43 AM in response to jzzz

Hello
I am seeing the same thing with all files after we tried to clone our Mac's I don't know if it this caused our files to change but we basically backed a pre-installed Mac and cloned it using terminal and using this command a lot (sudo ditto -rsrcFork).
So to help you file type converter helps.
Can some one help me.

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