External usb drive taking space on root fs?
 

Hello,

First of all, I'm a newbie, so pardon my ignorance.

I'm trying to backup just my home directory onto an external usb hard drive. I don't need any fancy compression or anything, just a straight recursive copy of my home directory and all its subdirectories so that I can reinstall Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy (due to unresolvable ati graphics card issues with Ubuntu 6.06 -- see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...70#post2300170) and copy the contents back. I followed these instructions to create a filesystem on a brand new "Safe Store" 250 GB external usb drive.: http://www.thelinuxpimp.com/main/mod...rticle&sid=561. Now I have a nice filesystem mounted at /mnt/usbdrive/ and it seems that I can read + write to it fine.

To copy over my home, I did this:

It seemed to be working slowly but surely (files were appearing in /mnt/usbdrive/backup), but then I got warnings that my memory was low, and when I used the System > Administration > System Monitor tool, I noticed that the memory on / was indeed being eaten away bit by bit (so to speak) as the the copy proceeded. I cancelled the copy and recursively removed /mnt/usbdrive/backup.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Isn't the whole point of an external drive that it doesn't take the space from your root filesystem? Are my method and/or understanding flawed?

Any help much appreciated.

Post the output of 'mount'. Sounds suspiciously like the USB drive isn't actually mounted and it was just replicating the data on the same drive.

Yah man, I believe you're right! I think I accidentally just created a new directory under /mnt and was copying everything there. I tried it again and good old Ubuntu automatically detected and mounted the usb drive, and I copied everything to it and all went super smoothly. I guess I screwed something up in my first attempt. Sorry for the false alarm, and thanks for the feedback!

Glad to help, don't think you're the only one whos done that. I mounted the wrong partition once and replaced all my coreutils with ones compiled for an ARM processor (runs things like iPods). That was fun to clean up :p