On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 07:33 +0000, Bryan Hepworth wrote:
Hi Everyone
I'm trying to back up /home to an external hard drive (maxtor usb) and
wanted to keep the file permissions but when I do a
cp -ar /home /media/usb it complains about not being able to do the
permissions and they all go across as root instead.
Anyone know where I'm going wrong?
Your USB drive is probably formatted as FAT32, which has no concept of
file ownership or permissions.
Options are to reformat the USB drive as a filesystem such as ext2 or
ext3 that supports Unix-style owners and permissions, or to use a
different tool to do the backup, such as tar, where the permissions can
be encapsulated within the backup target file, e.g.
cd /home; tar cf /media/usb/home.tar .
Paul.
--
Paul
Thanks for your suggestion - I re-jinked the harddrive to ext3 and
everything is fine now. I couldn't get Fedora to re-do it though it kept on
complaining when writing the fdisk changes so I eventually lost patience and
used ubuntu on another machine to nuke the drive and get ext3 on it.
It's working exactly as planned now.
Thank you.
Bryan
