Re:Apple Discontinues macOS Server
by tjohns on Thursday April 21, 2022 @03:26PM
(#31114107)
There is one .DS_Store file per directory. It contains information like window size, icon position, folder background, thumbnails, etc. Deleting/vetoing .DS_Store files will not hurt anything of substance - other than discarding user preferences.
There are also AppleDouble (._) files, which are one-per-file. These contain the file's extended metadata and resource fork. Deleting these _may_ cause data loss if there's anything important stored in the resource fork. A better option is to enable vfs_streams on your Samba server to allow storing the additional forks natively on your filesystem (e.g. as xattrs).
(If you're using a modern Windows file server, I believe the resource fork is automatically mapped to an NTFS alternate data stream.)
There are also AppleDouble (._) files, which are one-per-file. These contain the file's extended metadata and resource fork. Deleting these _may_ cause data loss if there's anything important stored in the resource fork. A better option is to enable vfs_streams on your Samba server to allow storing the additional forks natively on your filesystem (e.g. as xattrs).
(If you're using a modern Windows file server, I believe the resource fork is automatically mapped to an NTFS alternate data stream.)
See:
https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_stream...
https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_stream...