Dropbox Now Syncs Extended Attributes

Extended Attribute Sync – Syncing resource forks have historically been a pain for Mac users. In case you don’t know, resource forks are a secret area of a file that certain applications like Quicken, Quark, and OmniGraffle use to store important data. Most sync programs today completely ignore these forks, which results in a corrupted file on the other end. But worry not! Resource forks and other extended attributes now work great with Dropbox. Hooray!

via The Dropbox Blog » Blog Archive » Dropbox hits 1.0!.

This is great news. I use Dropbox to sync my ~/Library/Scripts and ~/Library/Services folder across multiple computers. ((the way I do that is to move all scripts and/or workflows I want to sync to ~/Dropbox/Scripts or ~/Dropbox/Services and replace the actual folder in ~/Library with a symlink: ln -s ~/Dropbox/Scripts ~/Library/Scripts ))

While AppleScript files usually work, some Automator Workflow files store extra information in extended attributes and those would break when syncing. Now with the latest version of Dropbox things work fine.

If you don’t use Dropbox yet, you should try it. You can support scriptingosx.com a little by signing up to Dropbox through this link, then both you and me will get some extra free storage space.