Recently I have restored my /home partition from my external HDD. Now my external HDD was NTFS formatted so after restoring the /home partition to an ext4 partition the permissions were all messed up so from Single User mode I had to restore the permissions using the following-:

But when I try to switch my user from root to sreyan I get the following problem-:
Notice that I have got my prompt even after permission denied has showed up.

Now I can't seem to access anything under my /home partition when I user sreyan.
sWhy is this happening ? I clearly changed my ownership why can't I still access it ?

Have you checked permissions? Directories 0755, files 0644.

Useto see the permissions on the directory itself without trying to look inside it. (And yes, "ls -la" still needs to look inside the directory to see the entry for "." .)

if you saved your LINUS /home partition on a MS NTFS drive
tit is mostly FUBAR

ntfs can not save the linux user permissions

it is NOT just the "owner" that was messed up
but the file settings
( 655,744,... )
and the ones that were executable like the *.desktop files

all that will have to be MANUALLY reset

-- on redhat yum can help
but on Debian using "apt-" ????????

start FRESH
rename EVERY!!! hidden "dot" folder and file to add a .bu at the end

and recreate them ALL by rebooting

then MANUALLY in a text editor edit the config files using the old NTFS saved files as a guide

this will TAKE time


well you leaned a lesson
you will NEVER EVER AGAIN save linux folders on a NTFS partition

Instead you should have saved a tar file. Which preserves permission, user, group and friends.

Thanks. I will do that next time. Can you just show me how to do that for next time ?

Specific examples at the site below with an explanation.

http://mylinuxramblings.wordpress.co...ome-directory/

Below is an example which creates a tar file of the /home/user directory which has the current date as part of the file name.

What happens if I want to make a backup of the entire /home folder ? (If there are multiple users)

Would this do ?

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I beg to differ that its not all FUBAR.

I solved it, though I don't think its the most elegant solution.

Okay here is what I did-:

I went to my root account and changed the ownership for the home account to sreyan (thats my normal unpriveledged account)

And I changed the all the permissions for all files and directories under my /home folder to 744 using-:

Now I woould like the opinions of other people regarding setting my permissions to 744. Is it okay, dangerous or perfect ?

To change the ownership, you had to execute that command as root.

Did you do that?

Example sudo chown -R x:x chown -R sreyan:sreyan ~

The ~ represents /home/sreyan

That's nice but it's wrong.

Should be:
And that should be:

No, due to how one "reads" a directory it's useless, literally.

tar -cf backup.tar directories files

That should work to backup /home.

Can you explain how you find commands work and what they do ? If so I will give a try. Still bit of a noob when it comes to commands.