If you see files in your Preservica Starter application called _MACOSX or DS_STORE and don't know where they came from then please read on.
These are both files used by the MAC OS that commonly exist as hidden files in multiple folders in a Mac system. If you ingest a folder using a zip file then these files will be visible as there is no concept of hidden files in Preservica.
Our advice would be to delete these files from Preservica as they do not contain useful information.
This is often true for modern (macOS) files, but if you are preserving older (e.g. pre-OS X ) Mac documents and files then there may be valuable data in the resource fork files within the __MACOSX folder and it would be important to preserve these.
Be careful when removing resource forks (“_.” files) as these can contain essential information. We received a large accession of digital photos transferred from a Mac environment (i.e. AppleDouble files) and discovered that removal of the resource fork caused certain post-production photo effects to disappear from the images.
I would like to find a way to better deal with AppleDouble files post-transfer (i.e. consolidate the forks), but haven’t yet discovered a good way to do this. I know it is possible to pull files out of the Mac environment without getting them as AppleDoubles, but that requires advance coordination with donors, etc., which is not always possible.
There are some OS9 formats where a lot of the goodness is in the resource forks, for example from audio editing systems. It’s possible that a future feature-enhancement to DROID may alert where there is a chance of Resource Forks containing useful data.
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