[DC LoCo] ownership and permissions

[Jerry Stilkind]

Thank you Greg for your reply.  I am the Jerry that Kevin referred to.  
I had been planning to post a question about ownership and permissions.  
When and if I cleared that up, I would have asked about backup 
programs.  Unfortunately, as has happened so often since Ubuntu, FF, TB, 
Libre were installed, I had to first fix a problem (about receiving this 
list) before I could get to the problem I wanted to ask about.

I have some folders and files on my hard drive, external hard drive and 
thumb drive that I want to delete or move to trash or move elsewhere.  I 
get messages when I try to do this such as:  "You are not the owner, so 
you cannot change these permissions," or "the permissions of Maddog (my 
external hard drive) could not be determined, or "the permissions of '/' 
could not be determined," and the like.  I have spent hours and hours 
going to permissions tabs at Properties on File System or individual 
folders and changed or tried to change some settings, looked at support 
pages and wound up sitting where I first started sitting, but with a 
sore rear and mind.  Having just seen a play about a Faustian bargain; I 
would be willing to go down that path if I can't get some help here.

I have been the sole user of my computer, I have administrative rights.  
All folders and files are owned by root, some have permissions beginning 
with dr, some with lr.

Would appreciate solutions in GUI.  I have several reasons why I don't 
want to use Terminal -- in addition to not knowing how.  Help would be 
greatly apprecciated.

Jerry



Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:01:29 -0400
> From: Greg Reagle<reagle at cepr.net>
> To: ubuntu-us-dc at lists.ubuntu.com
> Subject: Re: [DC LoCo] On vacation... Hoping for a "substitute teacher
> 	/	troubleshooter"
> Message-ID:<4E527D59.5040307 at cepr.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> On 08/05/2011 09:03 PM, Kevin Cole wrote:
>> 2) Simple Backup (sbackup)... not simple enough.  According to Jerry,
>> it now is leaving corrupt files around.  Also, there seems to be, at
>> least occasionally, an issue with permissions where it backs up
>> something he has ownership of, but then tells him he can't look at it.
>>    It backs up to the external hard drive (connected via USB cable). Are
>> there either (a) ways to tame it or (b) "simpler" backups?  I didn't
>> want to get into constructing a cron / rsync script, particularly
>> since it's not really a user-friendly solution, but if someone else
>> knows of a good package or has the savvy to construct a user-friendly
>> system and will make a house call, that would work.  DON'T try to send
>> a solution via e-mail as you'll just end up frustrating both yourself
>> and Jerry.  I'd also say that even over the phone, you're asking for a
>> heap of trouble.
> I don't have any experience with sbackup.  The only major experience with Linux backup solutions that I have is tar and rsync.  I've found that rsync works wonderfully.  I much prefer the command-line to GUIs.   One notable exception to this is that I love the GUI k3b for burning CDs.
>
> I understand that writing rsync and cron scripts is not user-friendly.  I know that getting the crontab syntax (those darn columns) and shell script syntax right can be tricky.  However, I also know that once it is set up properly and tested, it works really really well--reliable, efficient, great.  I also know that this kind of solution creates a dependence on an expert (i.e. someone who knows his/her way around a cronjob and shell script) to initially set up, and to troubleshot, if the need arises.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I can understand that this can be interpreted as dis-empowering; letting the naive end user do as much as possible without help is a good thing.On the other hand, specialization is the way of modern civilization--we have doctors and car mechanics for good reason.
>
> I know from experience using it in MS Windows, that Dropbox is a good user-friendly really easy to use backup GUI.  Would that work for Jerry?  Since it is Internet based, I don't recommend it for large amounts of data  (e.g. videos, music, photos).  I also don't trust it for private information (unless it is already encrypted of course).
>