hi

How to copy a directory with all rights and permissions to the USB flash drive?

if the drive is fat32 formatted you can not. the FAT and NTFS file systems do not understand true file permissions.

if on the other hand the drive is some form of ext then you can use rsync to copy the data

rsync -aviS should do the trick for you.

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Hi there. As lleb said, native Windows file systems like FAT and NTFS will not preserve Unix file ownership and permissions. Depending on your needs, you might want to repartition your flash drive (after backing up your data) and create two partitions, one that you will initialize as FAT (or NTFS) and the other as ext3 or ext4. Then create a directory in the ext partition and give it read & write permissions for your user: that's where your data will go.

Another command that will preserve file ownership and permissions, as well as timestamps and links, is 'cp -a' (i.e. "archive", which has the same effect as 'cp -dR --preserve=all'). See 'man cp' for reference.

The usb flash drive was formatted with ext4.
I have done the copy using rsync and will try to recover tomorrow on other server.

I know of rsync, but never got into using it. Anyone tell me what's wrong with just the cp command? You can use the -p option to preserve, the -r option to recurse directories, and the -f option to say "make it happen!"

you need

or

to preserve everything (owner/group, permissions, timestamps, symlinks, extended attributes). "-pr" is not enough, it misses extended attributes and links (copies links as regular files).

Just for being complete, it is indeed possible to store a directory tree with preserved permissions on FAT/NTFS file systems, if you use tar for the job.

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Use:
cp -dpr a/* b
or
cp -dpr a b