I don't quite follow: when you say an "external location" do you mean in file(s) in the file system but not in the file system's internal structure itself? Wit

I don't quite follow: when you say an "external location" do you mean in file(s) in the file system but not in the file system's internal structure itself? With regard to most file systems supporting extended attributes: that's true (though FAT32 not supporting them is a huge caveat, and I also wouldn't be at all shocked to see some issues during conversion across FSes... I don't have personal experience though), but email, HTTP downloads, peer-to-peer, etc don't tend to support them, essentially guaranteeing you'll lose them if you transfer them across the Internet. Also, it's really nice to not have to worry about, say, an EA-unaware POSIX app losing metadata... how many old-style Mac resource forks were lost during a simple file rename before mv was made resource fork-aware!