How to preserve tags

Support
1

Arguably, kopia preserves most extended attributes. Here’s an excerpt of mdls output on a file of mine:

kMDItemAcquisitionMake  = "NIKON CORPORATION"
kMDItemAcquisitionModel = "NIKON D90"
kMDItemExposureMode     = 0
kMDItemExposureProgram  = 3
kMDItemFlashOnOff       = 0
kMDItemFNumber          = 4.5
kMDItemFocalLength      = 70
kMDItemFocalLength35mm  = 105
kMDItemKeywords         = (
    Landscape
)
kMDItemWhiteBalance     = 0
kMDItemISOSpeed         = 1400

As we can see, a fair amount of information is preserved.

The one thing that is missing (and that I care about) on files restored from backup is:

kMDItemUserTags         = (
    my_test_tag,
    and_some_more
)

which are Finder tags (macOS). Looking at the mdls output, I can’t see how this information is stored any differently than others. Any idea why kMDItemUserTags is left out? And more importantly, how to preserve it?

2

On macOS you should find some alternative to getfacl/setfacl (ls -le && chmod might be used) and run just before snapshot and save it together with snapshot, so in case you need to restore all file’s metadata, you would have its stage

3

Thanks for your input. Although I’m not that concerned about ACLs, you are right: I could dump mdls output to a file that would also be backed-up by kopia.

Brett Terpstra had a tool to do something similar, precisely for Finder tags. That’s from ten (10!) years ago, though.

I think I’ll reach out to him and see what his current solution is.