cloning drive

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Tuesday 10 July 2007, Greg Booth wrote:

> I think you'd have to use an ext3 partition, the fat32 partition won't
> retain your uid:gid structure.

Right, and more importantly, it won't retain *permissions*.  You seem to imply 
further down that you are putting the user/group structure into the same 
category as permissions in your head.  That's not the whole story at all.  
Ownership is comparatively easy to fix, but permissions (eg. the executable 
bit on directories) are are a serious pain in the ass to restore once they're 
stripped away.

If the original poster wants to make a backup which preserves all of this 
(strongly recommended), and  wants to keep the existing filesystem on the 
external drive, then I'd recommend making a tarball.

Something like this (off the top of my head, syntax not checked)

  cd /mnt/external_partition
  tar cf home-backup.tar /home

Since there's presumably enough space on the target device without 
compression, using it this way would save the time of waiting for gzip or 
bzip2 to squeeze and unsqueeze everything on either end.

This could probably be accomplished with a handy graphical interface using Ark 
(Utilities -> Ark on the K menu), I imagine.  Quick look at it, and it seems 
so, though I've never actually used it myself.  (I didn't use WinZip either.  
Ptooey.  I love command lines.)
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre