Why can't I copy and paste in ext3?
 

I was using a usb flash drive (formatted NTFS) to back up Back in Time and it took 5-6 minutes to write when I unmount the flash drive, which makes no sense as the changes I'm making for Back in Time are minuscule (Like changing a few lines on an .odt doc.) and Back in Time is supposed to write only incremental changes.

So I figured the NTFS was the problem and reformatted the drive to ext3, figuring it to be more Linux friendly but now I can't copy and paste anything in it.

Anybody know what gives? Thanks.

I might if you provided a bit more information. Such as:

• what distro and what kind of GUI, if you know
• what precisely you are doing - copy what file, paste it where, how do you copy and paste
• what error message if any
• have you tried the command line

Do you have permission to write to the flash drive? Have you tried writing to the flash drive as root?

sounds like a permission issue; how did you format the drive, how are you mounting it?

thanks berndbausch.

-Xubuntu and I think it's xfce
-I wanted to paste a installation file for Bodhi and I either right clicked or used the File button and selected 'copy' or 'paste' (Pretty standard stuff--I didn't do anything unusual)
-no error message, the 'paste' indicator wasn't activated was all
-did not try the command line (am pretty not knowledgeable about using it)

Yeah, in fact, after the ext3 failed I formatted it to NTFS again and it worked fine. Did not try the root route. P.S. Love your name. :)

Formatted it in Gparted. It mounts automatically when connected.

well, now that you undid the problem, we cannot troubleshoot it anymore?
in hindsight, i think that gparted formated the stick to ext3, owned by root.
a simple "chown" on the whole partition should fix that though, permanently.

fwiw, i format all my usb sticks to fat32.

I tend to format USB sticks as ext4 as I don't trust FAT and, on the larger ones, want to be able to store files larger than 3.2GB.
The downside, however, is that by default they are mounted read only in XFCE (and, I seem to recall, other DEs) so I have to manually use chmod or chown on the mount point then, sometimes, eject and remount the device, a few times in order to be able to write to them.
Come to mention it though I seem to recall even FAT32 drives being mounted as read only by default at least some of the time. I know my portable media player was until I changed it.

Thanks ondoho. I formatted all my usb sticks to fat32 too but then Back in Time didn't work with it anymore.

How do I do the simple chown on the whole partition?

Thanks 273. When I Googled around I found others having the same sort of issues (with the read-only etc.). Seems quite the hassle, esp. for a non-techie. And I never had a problem when the flash drive was FAT32. I don't know. Everybody here says the exts are so great but I'm leaning toward NTFS myself. I like the flexibilty of it working with Linux and Windows and it seems more Linux friendly than FAT32.

It depends on what you want to do, I think. FAT32 has been used for years and works with both Linux and Windows and despite my snarky comments it's not that problematic in day-to-day use in my experience -- as long as you never want files larger than 3.2GB. NTFS is probably OK with Linux but it being closed-source I worry that the Linux version won't meet the specification quite right.
Just "chmod -R a+w" on the mount point or, better still, update fstab and use use etx4. Unless, of course, you need Windows support then it's FAT32 or NTFS only, really (yes, various ext drivers work for Windows but I've not heared of one working without some minor issues at least).

in retrospect (after 273's subsequent post) i'm not so sure that that would help, but i think there's no harm in trying.
- find out what the path to the mountpoint is, e.g. with "mount".
supposing your username is gregg and you're in the users group (a simple 'ls -al $HOME' will tell you):

Thanks 273. You know, it's just a flash drive. I need nonFAT32 for Back in Time so I'll stick with NTFS (even though it's so slow), and I'll use FAT32 for everything else.

Thanks ondoho. I've been over-complicating this thing. I'm just going to stick with FAT32 for now. (Maybe some day I'll experiment with the exts again.)