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Copy, clone, backup: is there a difference?

Copies, clones and backups are three different things. Here their differences are explained with examples from APFS and modern macOS.

October 1, 2022 Macs, Technology

Explainer: deduplication

Track down all those duplicated files, and you could save yourself loads of disk space. Rather, you used to be able to. Why this doesn’t work so well now.

May 29, 2021 Macs, Technology

How abysmal SMB performance can choke networked backups

How can it take over 5 hours to back up 79 GB of files to a network share? That’s an average transfer rate of 4 MB/s, probably slower than your Internet connection.

April 16, 2021 Macs, Technology

How can you tell whether a file has been ‘cloned’ in APFS?

APFS can ‘clone’ files when copying or duplicating them within the same volume. But how can you tell whether any given file is a clone?

April 2, 2021 Macs, Technology

Controlling metadata: Tricks with persistence

Unlike file data, metadata has varying persistence. Some is ephemeral, others sticky. macOS has inbuilt mechanisms for managing the persistence of extended attributes.

November 2, 2020 Macs, Technology

Cut-Copy-Paste: Inside the Pasteboard/Clipboard

How these fundamental features work in macOS, using the pboard daemon and UTIs. With full log transcripts too.

May 12, 2020 Macs, Technology

Copy, move and clone files in APFS, a primer

What happens when you copy a large file to the same volume, or duplicate it, on the same APFS volume? Here are the answers.

April 14, 2020 Macs, Technology

Clipping files: copying through the Finder

All about textClipping and pictClipping files: what they are, and how to access the data within them.

March 5, 2019 Macs, Technology

Finder Aliases and Bookmarks: a summary

Diagram summarising how Finder Aliases work, including their resolution. And how to confuse QuickLook thumbnails.

January 12, 2019 Macs, Technology

Aliases and Bookmarks are smarter than you think

Finder Aliases can update their path information when they are resolved. Also some differences between Aliases and Bookmarks.

January 11, 2019 Macs, Technology

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