Copying from one disk drive to another

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

This is the 3rd attempt at copying /home to an external hard disk drive, today.

I have an external 80 gig usb 2.0 hard drive. I want to copy /home to it. When the 80 gig (marks80 is the icon name and 'folder' name in /media) is powered up, at OS boot time, I get the .dmrc errors. Not a problem, I click OK and dismiss that. Many times I've posted about the .dmrc problem and cannot get the permissions set correctly, so, mostly the 80 gig drive is unpowered except during copying /home.

I tried gksudo nautilus to copy the /home to the 80gig. No luck finding it as my /home is on it's own partition (sda3).

At first, opening a Gnome file manager window and copying the /home to the 80 gig balked because of the directory lost+found. So, I drilled down one level to /home/mark (my user name is: mark) and tried to copy that to the 80 gig. At first I got another permission problem about .gvfs and clicked: "skip", and the copying proceeded ok, until the last 2 gig (of 30 gigs total to copy), when another permissions problem reared it's ugly head. The error message read:

/media/marks80/.config/transmission/gtk

and the file is: socket

I'm not good at fixing permisssion, well, I have never got the .dmrc permssions fixed (2+ years), so, I would like to have a way to copy my /home to the external usb drive, without so many problems.

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

This is the 3rd attempt at copying /home to an external hard disk drive, today.

I have an external 80 gig usb 2.0 hard drive. I want to copy /home to it. When the 80 gig (marks80 is the icon name and 'folder' name in /media) is powered up, at OS boot time, I get the .dmrc errors. Not a problem, I click OK and dismiss that. Many times I've posted about the .dmrc problem and cannot get the permissions set correctly, so, mostly the 80 gig drive is unpowered except during copying /home.

I tried gksudo nautilus to copy the /home to the 80gig. No luck finding it as my /home is on it's own partition (sda3).

At first, opening a Gnome file manager window and copying the /home to the 80 gig balked because of the directory lost+found. So, I drilled down one level to /home/mark (my user name is: mark) and tried to copy that to the 80 gig. At first I got another permission problem about .gvfs and clicked: "skip", and the copying proceeded ok, until the last 2 gig (of 30 gigs total to copy), when another permissions problem reared it's ugly head. The error message read:

/media/marks80/.config/transmission/gtk

and the file is: socket

I'm not good at fixing permisssion, well, I have never got the .dmrc permssions fixed (2+ years), so, I would like to have a way to copy my /home to the external usb drive, without so many problems. The file operations icon remains on the panel and never completes it's operation. Force closing it blows up the desktop and I have to reboot.

[inportb]

I believe the right way to recursively copy while preserving attributes and permissions is cp -a source destination. Use sudo if necessary. I just backed up and restored a home directory this way and it worked fine.

[jbrown96]

try it from the command line

sudo cp -R /home/mark /media/folder

I believe the .dmrc issue can be fixed with this

sudo chmod 644 /home/mark/.dmrc

you might need to change the location of .dmrc.
If you are using this for backups, try rsync. I believe this is the command, but others should verify it first.

sudo rsync -zvvr /home/mark/ /media/folder

then you can run this command each time you want a backup and it will only copy info that has changed, which makes the process very fast.

[inportb]

Cross-posting much?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=969605

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

The right way to copy while preserving attributes and permissions is cp -a source destination (-ar for recursion). I just backed up and restored a home directory this way and it worked just fine.

OK, I'm doing this as:

cp -ar /home /media/marks80

the disks are spinning. It takes about 30 minutes. For now, I'm marking this thread as solved, but I leave the Ubuntu-Linux community with one question.

Why is this cp -ar /source /desitination command not a part of some simple to use graphical interface which shows either file copied progress, either as a percentage? (example: 33%) Or as a bar filling up (much to much Microsoft like for my taste, but I'm only 'complaining' not writing code. (I'm an author, not a programmer).

Thanks community.

[bodhi.zazen]

Cross-posting much?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=969605

Threads merged.

[inportb]

I guess it's because people don't usually make backup archives using the filemanager. Typically, backups are automated.

I just realized that cp -ar is the same as cp -a, since -a implies -r. Going to edit my post above now =p

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

I can't get this to work. I'm not able to explain what is happening. And I'm frightened for my data (/home of 30gig, and I don't do p2p stuff. It's all my creations or saved stuff).

Following inportb's command:

cp -a /source /desination

I have a copy of /home on my external usb drive.

Since I'm trying to shrink the size of my / (sda1) (which included /home before it was moved to it's own partition (sda3). I went back to

gksudo nautilus

deleted /home with shift-delete.

Rebooted. Ooooooooppppppppppssssssss!!! Home is gone and now the 80 gig drive won't let me copy it back to where it came from. AND I can't figure out the last part of the command structure. Please recall that 'mark' is my username and group name.

cp -a /media/marks80/home/mark/home /home

or should that be:

cp -a /media/marks80/home/mark/home /home/mark?

For the moment that doesn't matter as:

mark@Lexington-19:/media/marks80$ cp -a home /home
cp: cannot create directory `/home/home': Permission denied

and

mark@Lexington-19:/media/marks80$ cp -a home /
cp: preserving times for `/home/lost+found': Operation not permitted

although the last one does seem to be copying something, where I do not know.

[inportb]

Boot up as far as you can and get into a terminal. Then: (assuming you don't have /home on a dedicated partition. in that case, say so and we'll do something else)

sudo -i
mv /home /home0
mkdir /home
cp -a /media/marks80/home/mark /home/

... assuming that /media/marks80/home is a copy of your old /home and mark is your username.