Antifuchs' µblag

A Backup system is only as good as the restores that are possible from it. I decided to test OS X 10.5's Time Machine using the excellent Backup Bouncer tool by Nate Gray. Unfortunately, 0.1.1 has a little bug that breaks extended attribute comparisons; I fixed that, and now things look like this:

        sudo ./bbouncer verify -d ~/Desktop/TMBBouncerSrc \
~/Desktop/TMBBouncerDest
Verifying:    basic-permissions ... ok
Verifying:           timestamps ... 
   Sub-test:    modification time ... ok
ok
Verifying:             symlinks ... ok
Verifying:    symlink-ownership ... FAIL
Verifying:            hardlinks ... ok
Verifying:       resource-forks ... ok
Verifying:         finder-flags ... ok
Verifying:         finder-locks ... ok
Verifying:        creation-date ... ok
Verifying:            bsd-flags ... ok
Verifying:       extended-attrs ... 
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok
   Sub-test:       on directories ... ok
   Sub-test:          on symlinks ... ok
ok
Verifying: access-control-lists ... 
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok
   Sub-test:              on dirs ... ok
ok
Verifying:                 fifo ... FAIL
Verifying:              devices ... FAIL
Verifying:          combo-tests ... 
   Sub-test:  xattrs + rsrc forks ... ok
   Sub-test:     lots of metadata ... ok
ok

So, it can't reproduce fifo and device nodes, and the owner of a symlink is root. I don't much care about devices, but reproducing fifos would be a nice touch as they are sometimes used as a persistent inter-process communications point. You might care about symlink ownership; for example, Apache's SymLinksIfOwnerMatch directive breaks if it is active and another user restores a web site directory that contains symlinks from Time Machine backups.