As a Mepis lover I am running Mepis 8.0 using Ark to backup to a Seagate USB hard drive. I have posted my problem on the Mepis forum but haven't gotten a solution as yet. here & and here As I have stated in these posts, I am able to backup directly to the external hard drive while running Mint 8 or PCLOS 2009. To use the the external hard drive for backup in Mepis 8 I have to use Ark to place the backup on the Desktop and then copy it to the external hard drive. I have set the permissions, I have reformatted the external hd to ext3. There has to be a reason for happening but as a relative newbie, I am not sure which way to go. I have googled the web and forums but haven't found the answer. Does anyone have any idea about how I might find the resolution?

Thanks,

What options are being used when you mount the drive?

When I plug in the USB hd, Mepis puts an icon on the desktop and I either click on the icon or right-click and click mount. I do most of my work from the gui.

What user is Ark running as? Does that user have write permissions?

Now I hadn't thought of that. I have just been clicking on the Ark in the menu and going from there. Not sure off the top of my head how to check and see what user is running Ark. Since I am the only user, I just assumed it was me since it was in the menu. Here is the command given in the menu - "ark -caption "%c" %i %m %U". I see that I can run it as a different user but how do I check and see who the current user is?

edit
I just used konsole and did 'whereis ark" and it is located in /user/bin and the owner is root. There was also ark.1.gz located in /usr/share/man/man1 that was owned by root.
I checked with find files from the menu and it showed ark located at /user/share/menu and it is owned by root. I will change ownership of that one and try again and post back.

Well I changed permissions on the /user/share/menu/ark to read and write for group and changed owner to my user name and it still says that I don't have permission to write to the external hd. So I rebooted (old windows habit) and tried again...same thing. Do I need to change ownership and/or permissions for Ark at /usr/bin?

edit
I looked at some of the other apps in my menu and they are owned by root.

Doing while it is running will show you the user it's running as. The owner of the binary is a different thing and probably shouldn't be changed.

According to this it looks like to me that user 1000, which is me, is running it.

I feel that this is a problem is related to Mepis in particular and not to Linux in general. This thread can be deleted. Going to try and find the resolution at Mepis. Thanks to everyone.