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I wonder if the OP and the article linked in one of the other comments looked at whether or not the Sierra install was on APFS or not. High Sierra automatically
by dkonofalski 9y ago
I wonder if the OP and the article linked in one of the other comments looked at whether or not the Sierra install was on APFS or not. High Sierra automatically converts all drives to APFS during install while Sierra does not. Since Sierra stores xattrs in a special B*-tree node rather than as extended filesystem attributes, it's possible that the High Sierra install is saving them to iCloud Drive properly with all the filesystem attributes and the Sierra install is dropping them, for security reasons, as they would have been invalid on an HFS+ filesystem.
That should be viewed as a bug from the user-perspective but, because those extended attributes literally did not exist when Sierra was released, it's hard to say that it should be considered a bug for Apple when it's functioning exactly as intended in terms of the filesystem. It's almost like complaining when MS-DOS saved files as NAMEOF~1.DOC instead of "Name of Really Long File.doc" from Windows 95.
- duskwuff 9y ago> Since Sierra stores xattrs in a special B*-tree node rather than as extended filesystem attributes... I think you've misunderstood something. "Extended filesystem attributes" is literally just what xattrs stands for -- "eXtended ATTRibuteS". "A special B-tree node" is one way that a filesystem can choose to internally store xattrs. They aren't two separate things.
- dkonofalski 9y agoI haven't misunderstood it (I don't think). B*-tree is basically a hack to store extended attributes that weren't initially included in HFS. APFS includes those extended attributes natively. I'm just wondering if the difference in how they're stored is the reason for the loss.
- userbinator 9y agoI doubt it, since the APIs to access them are the same.