Copying hidden files

[Jonas Norlander]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:31 PM, Nigel Ridley
<nigel at prayingforisrael.net> wrote:
> David Ex wrote:
>> "
>>
>> What is the best way to backup the home directory?  I found quite a few
>> options over the internet, but not sure what is the easiest.
>> gk
>>
>>
>>
>> "
>>
>> throw it all on a thumb drive :)
>
> Not a good idea (for dot files)! If you do it this way you will lose all your set 'permissions'
> and when you copy them back to your /home you will have problems with kde starting.
>
> Nigel
>

It depends on the filesystem on the drive if permissions is preserved
or not, fat32 is common on flash-disks and don't preserve permissions,
user and group information. But even if you have a filesystem that can
preserve the permissions from your Linux system there is no guarantee
that the UID and GID is the same on the new system as your old and in
that case you still need to chown the /home directory. I think that
rdiff-backup can store and restore invalid filename characters,
permissions, acl and xattr even on fat32 and ntfs so that solution
could be worth to check.

/ Jonas