Using USB Memory To Back Up
 

I have an old laptop running Slackware 9.1 which has no CD writer or floppy drive. In order to be able to back up, I have bought a 128Mb USB pen drive, so I can copy files to the drive and transfer them to my main PC.

However...

Upon transferring files to the drive, they seem to be instantly marked as executable and the icon shown for the file in Rox-Filer, my file manager of choice, changes.

Is this a fault in Rox, or is it related to the USB drive? Do I need to format the drive in some way to ensure that the relevant information is preserved?

Hey,

Format the USB Stick as an ext2 or ext3 filesystem. It could be using msdos filesystem by default :S.


mkfs.ext3 (IIRC anyways... This is for my slackware10 box. Command could differ).

Thanks. If memory serves there were some Windows-related files on there already, so it sounds like that could be it.

I'll check the filesystem commands in Running Linux and give it a whirl.

Awesome, tell me how that goes.

BTW FAT32 filesystems do not have any file permissions. Furthermore, if you do not want to reformat the flash drive then archive the files using tar before copying. The linux file permissions will be saved.

michaelk - using tar sounds like a good idea. That way I can also use the USB doobrie to take a copy of MAME to use on the windows PCs at work. :D

Heh. Nice one.