Apple - How to move a folder containing aliases to another machine without breaking the aliases?
Aliases are not the same as symlinks.
Symlinks just point to a path (relative or absolute). Aliases first track the file's unique ID and then the path.
Since there are two pieces of information stored in an alias - they are more robust and will follow a file that's moved based on the unique ID. The downside is that the unique ID is based on the file system so copying the file elsewhere mints a new ID so the alias doesn’t map to the new location by design and implementation (currently at least).
Finder (or the very powerful ditto
) are your best bets for moving aliases intact. Worst case you could use disk utility to make an image of a folder that contains everything needed as a subfolder and then move that to preserve the relative locations of the files and isolate the effects of a short name change (/Users/whatever) in case you wish to change that. Once the original mac is disconnected from the new mac - the aliases will reconnect as desired to location of the files on the new mac.
I believe aliases will be handled correctly if copied through the finder, even to external media. If you are doing it through rsync
you will probably have issues.
References:
- Forum Posting
- Script to possibly convert Aliases to Symlinks