I have a serious problem with backups in the Linux world. Actually, the backup is the easy part. My difficulty is restoring the files, or some of the files. I am using simple backup (sbackup/srestore) in Ubuntu 8.04.

I noticed that the ownership are changed on restore. Everything is now owned by root. I think some of the permissions have been changed as well.

The docos on sbackup/srestore says I need to manually reset the ownerships and permissions when restoring! I find that shocking, actually. I expected that to be an automatic feature of the srestore. Not manual.

Ok. I am a noob. Can someone please tell me that I have misunderstood the whole srestore process, and that I can restore files from backups, with ownerships and permissions as before. As otherwise, I am already in serious trouble.

If you are attempting to restore to a location on which you don't have sufficient privileges then obviously you need to be root. If problem is of restoring you ownership on those files, then you can get it done through..

being root.. do..

chown user_name file_name..

eg..

chown john foo.txt



Cheers!!

Well, that's the way that particular backup software works, unfortunately. On a bright note, you'll still have your data...

Tar has options to preserve ownership/permissions on data, or you might want to check into some other backup solutions, like Backula or Arkeia.

How do you keep track of the original owners and permissions that you have to restore to? What do you need to do so that you can get the original permissions and owners?