ExpanDrive

We require you to type the password because we have to install files to /System/Library/Filesystems, which is not in userland. The VFS layer we use, called MacFuse, is a bridge between the kernel and user space and as such must have kernel access.

You may notice that some files you expect to be symlinks are not appearing as links, and the ones that do appear as links do not work. This difference has to do with how link resolution on a mounted filesystem works when the root of the filesystem is not /. If clients always mounted /, there would be no problems, but since this is not the case, we had take some liberties with link resolution, namely, resolving the links behind the scenes and returning metadata about the link target in place of metadata about the link.

For example, if you have a link to /usr/bin in your home directory and you mount your home directory using ExpanDrive, that link will continue pointing to /usr/bin (remember that symlinks are just text files containing something that looks like a path). Unfortunately, every path on the mounted drive is relative to the mountpoint (~ in our example) and therefore the link actually resolves to ~/usr/bin, which probably does not exist, and is certainly not the correct answer anyway; but that is the answer Finder will get if we let it handle links all on its own. Instead, we do some magic and query the real target of the link, returning that information instead. The flip-side to this is that Finder is no longer aware there was a link to begin with.

And what if the link target is invalid? In this case, we return the metadata about the link, which means the link will display as such in Finder, but will not do anything else.

These files had all of their data stored in the resource fork and none in the data fork. Resource forks are meaningless outside of the OS X filesystem, so this information is usually discarded when the file is transferred to a different filesystem. Resource fork data is not always extraneous, though it often is, so to be safe, you can archive these files as .zip or .sitx before storing them on ExpanDrive. It is difficult to know which files have resource forks in advance, but a good indicator is if the file's size is given as 0K from the terminal, but greater than 0K in Finder.

At this time, users have reported that Eudora uses resource forks for some important settings files. It is recommended that you archive your Eudora folders before transferring using ExpanDrive, or you will lose data.

Yes - leave the password field blank, and if you have a key already set up it will authenticate you. If you need help setting up public keys check here, it's pretty easy.

No, not yet. We're working on it.

This seems to be a bug/feature in Finder on Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard”; when you eject a drive while it is selected in Finder, that particular Finder window closes. This is true of any drive, including the CD/DVD drive. To avoid this, click on something outside of ExpanDrive in the Finder window before ejecting ExpanDrive.

Usually this means that your connection has momentarily gone down. Not to worry, as soon as you reestablish a connection to the internet, ExpanDrive will automatically reconnect, and your files will reappear. If they don't appear immediately, just click ExpanDrive in Finder.