Saturday, June 13, 2009

iPhoto 8.0.3 causes you to backup all your data again


That is, if you don't realize what happened.
I haven't found a reference as to why this was done, but after my upgrade to iPhoto 8.0.3, my rsync backup strategy decided to re-backup almost every picture I have in my library. That is until I did some poking around and found this in my iPhoto Library directory:
drwx---rwx  29 jared  staff        986 Jan 11 11:25 Data.noindex
lrw-rw-rw-   1 jared  staff         14 Jun  7 17:16 Data -> ./Data.noindex
Of course Jun 7 at 17:16 is about exactly when I upgraded to 8.0.3. Anyhow, this simple command from the appropriate point on my backup drive saved me a very large rsync:
$ mv Data Data.noindex
If you're using TimeMachine this isn't possible or desireable. I've seen forum posts on the net that imply that 8.0.3 will cause TimeMachine to re-backup everything, but it seems to me it should be smart enough to realize that those files just changed their path; the inode number probably didn't change.