Hi

I'm currently at a clients place of work trying to restore their server. Before I restore the server I've created a backup of critical work data onto a usb external harddrive by running Knoppix live cd.

Unfortunately not all files are been copied due to filenames having special characters in their name, and these are spread throught the directory. The files I've managed to copy over have had their permissions totally changed.

As root I've chmod'ed a couple of test files to return the permissions however, despite no error reported the permissions are not altering!

In addition, the files that I've copied are now been read by a Mac as UNIX executable's!

Please does anyone have any ideas? The client has been without any workable server for a week and I'm the third person they've drafted in to resolve the situation.

Sean

What filesystem is on the USB hard drive? Some filesystems, such as FAT, don't support users and permissions, so all files on there are all given some default permissions when you look at it from Linux or something.

Alternatively, you can tar the files into a tarball; that should preserve the Unix filesystem attributes.

The usb external harddrive was orginally VFAT which I reformatted as Ext3.
Even as Ext3 format the permissions are been altered.

I'm in process of using the excellent System Rescue Linux CD www.sysresccd.org in order to take a ghost image of the data, which I'm sure will matain file permissions and the company's filenaming. Fingers crossed.

I've advised them they seriously need to consider a defined naming standard without using special characters in filenames to be adopted throught their offices and some form of redundancy backup system.

Cheers for the reply