High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Due to the metadata-rich nature of the Macintosh Hierarchical File System, transferring Mac OS files to platforms that do not support HFS can be problematic. MacBinary was developed as a means of preserving this structure without sacrificing portability. It combines the data and resource forks and the Finder information of a file into a single document. This document is then suitable for transport via FTP, the World Wide Web, and electronic mail. The documents can also be stored on computers that run operating systems with no HFS support, such as Unix or Windows.