cloning drive

[Greg Booth]

On 7/10/07, D. Michael McIntyre <michael.mcintyre at rosegardenmusic.com> wrote:
> 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
>
Very good points indeed, people (me included) tend to forget that tar
was actually used as a backup utility from the get go, in fact I
believe tar is short for "tape archive" and was used originally for
bundling up files onto tapes.

Greg