Can't preserve creation, modification times on copy

[physicsguy]

I created a striped ZFS. I turned off atime on my afp share. When I do a finder copy under Mac OS X, the creation and modification times are preserved. But if I do a "cp -p" in terminal, the creation and modification times are updated to the current time. I need to do a lot of copying and doing it thru the finder is slower and a big hassle. Why doesn't cp -p work the way it should when copying to a freenas share? It worked OK when copying to a readyNAS. Thanks for any help.

 

[physicsguy]

I take back what I said about the readyNAS. The cp -p worked in preserving creation/modification time copying FROM readyNAS to external Firewire. I don't know if it would have worked the other way around. My readyNAS is taken apart so I can't try it now. Still looking for an answer to my problem of cp -p to freenas.

 

[Scrat]

You're right, just tested it on my MacBook (Lion 10.7). Same behavior with cp -a. Then I set "AFP3 Unix Privs -> on" in the share settings and now it works as expected.

Greets, Peter

 

[physicsguy]

Thanks! That almost does the trick! It fixes the modification and last opened time. But the creation time is still now. Same with rsync -rlpt command. Finder drag and drop preserves everything. What magic could apple be doing?

 

[physicsguy]

I read somewhere that ditto is the CL equivalent of Finder drag-and-drop. But had same problem. The only work-around I have so far is to create a Mac disk image (e.g., a sparseimage) on the freenas. Then mount the image and write to that with cp -p, rsync -rlpt, or ditto. That preserves all attributes. Kind of a hassle, and not cross-platform: Windows can't read HFS+ disk images. Haven't tried with MBR FAT32 image and won't bother. There has to be a better way.

 

[Scrat]

Thanks! That almost does the trick! It fixes the modification and last opened time. But the creation time is still now. Same with rsync -rlpt command. Finder drag and drop preserves everything. What magic could apple be doing?

Does it mean creation time is later than modification time? That's funny. Sorry, but I have no further ideas.