I am trying to rsync my root filesystem to another computer on my LAN.

I mount the other computer's Windows shares (smbfs), mkdir a backup directory, and cd to it. Then I run:

root@ttyp0[DUMP]# rsync -av --progress /mnt/hdb1/ .

(/mnt/hdb1 is the location of the Slackware root filesystem when I boot from Knoppix.)

But I get literally hundreds of these errors:

chown "/tmpmnt/backup/DUMP/usr/include/gdbm.h" failed: Operation not permitted

Anyone know why this may be? Not every file returns the error, but sometimes large blocks of them do; other times, the errors are very sparse and infrequent. The worst areas seem to be hidden folders like /home/foo/.kde/baz/quux.quuux

...Incidentally, I'd really prefer to use dump rather than rsync.... but I'm under the impression that I have to dump to a device (such as /dev/hdb1) rather than an existing filesystem (like /backup/DUMP/). Am I correct?

Thanks a bunch!

--S

That's because smbfs (or vfat, for that matter) know
nothing about Linux ownerships and rights. RSyncing
to those is not a good idea, I'd suggest tarring stuff
to one of the FS mentioned above if you want to
preserve the ownerships and permissions.


Cheers,
Tink

Okay, so should I do something like:

# tar -zcvvf rootdump.tgz /mnt/hdb1/
# mkdir /tmpmnt
# mount -t smbfs //FOO/bar/baz/quux /tmpmnt
# mv rootdump.tgz /tmpmnt/backup
# umount /tmpmnt

And then I should be free to fdisk /dev/hdb.

Any important options / steps I'm forgetting? UID, GID, and permissions are preserved by tar by default, right?

Thanks again!

--Dan

You could actually start creating the file on the
smbshare, rather than moving if afterwards ... but
that may be slower.

And yes, tar stores UID, GID, permissions and creation
time by default.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks!!

--S