AAARRRGHH!! Please help with plugins falling apart as they cross platforms when moving!

[spigmu]

This isn't vst specific, but is a thorn in the side when downloading plugins to OS X stored on some non OS X servers. We've all seen this, but I'm wondering if there's an easier way to solve it when halfway in it.

A single VST plugin alone, dragged to cloud storage from OS X, errors because of the way it is packaged. Put it in a folder and it copies but the folder shows a folder within, not the VST package, and within that the folder named "Contents". Downloaded back to a drive, from a service such as Google drive, a folder with multiple items gets zipped, and then when it arrives on the drive it's in the proper VST form. But if you're on another service, like OneDrive and others, it ends up unpackaged when uploaded but NOT repackaged when downloaded. So a backed up plugins folder, unless zipped, ends up all over the place in terms of what it has. The problem with zipping a whole plugin back is that you can't pull out one 100k plug in, and if there are a bunch of big rompers etc. it's a huge 70 gig folder to zip and store, when I don't even want to archive the romplers Or something like that.

I have a whole assortment of small clouds going and, unfortunately, chose OneDrive to kick up to a large amount to organize my DAW files, including instruments, so I uploaded tons of DAW related folders to it and it's sadly messed up. It's bad enough how OneDrive rejects so many files I have with simple illegal characters like '? '(though that's not a OneDrive specific issue.), but it has an inconvenient way of doing it. The single plugins are zero K errors and any within folders are as I described. Google seems to be the only cloud I have that doesn't suffer this (by rezipping), but I don't wish to use GDrive as my paid service. DropBox doesn't do it when mirroring a local OS X drive, but the point of this is to not have it mirrored. Haven't gotten to checking yet if DB keeps the integrity when not mirroring.

Short of starting over, going over whole DAW plugin folders and zipping and uploading everything separately, what is the best way to be organized about this? I'm just interested in having entire plugin folders and categorized folders of plugins on the cloud and being able to cherry pick them back, not download the whole folder.

Thanks for any wisdom here
s

[Michael L]

Duct tape

[Eirikur]

It could be the ancient Mac "resource fork" file problem. If you copy a file that contains code from a Mac to a non-Mac system of any kind, it will be invalid when you copy it back to a Mac. This is because of the ancient design decision to put binary data into the resource fork of the Mac file. No other computer system supports this because when you read a file as if it were an ordinary file, you only get the data fork, not the resource fork. You have to either not use non-Mac servers, or put everything into archives like Stuffit, the preserve both forks. You can store such archives on any server that stores ordinary files.

[fese]

It could be the ancient Mac "resource fork" file problem. If you copy a file that contains code from a Mac to a non-Mac system of any kind, it will be invalid when you copy it back to a Mac. This is because of the ancient design decision to put binary data into the resource fork of the Mac file. No other computer system supports this because when you read a file as if it were an ordinary file, you only get the data fork, not the resource fork. You have to either not use non-Mac servers, or put everything into archives like Stuffit, the preserve both forks. You can store such archives on any server that stores ordinary files.

That is still a thing?? I remember this from the nineties with the old MacOS (stopped using Mac after 9)... they really ported the resource fork thing to OSX? Why?

[Russell Grand]

AAARRRGHH!! Please help with plugins falling apart...

[adammonroe]

The problem is that on OS X VST, AU, ect. plugins aren't really file formats they are BUNDLES, which are essentially just fancy file directories. Copy these files over to a Windows based system and weird things are going to happen, like the pkginfo getting changed into an executable, because it's trying to make sense of this weird folder/directory. The only real way to maintain the integrity of the plugin across different operating systems is to zip them.

[jancivil]

Lotta things lately do that on OSX, by one would think Windows-centric devs