Burning mixed ownership of files to disk producing a problem?

William Case billlinux at rogers.com
Thu Nov 18 22:29:19 UTC 2010


This reply is as a continuation of the discussion, not an argument with
your suggestions. In the end I just burned the user files and left it at
that.  See below for details ...

On Fri, 2010-11-19 at 05:14 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 11:32 -0500, William Stock wrote:
> > In a small test I had no problem burning some of "my" files and some
> > "root/root" files.  However, using the CD for a restore would be a
> > gigantic pain in the backside.  You'd be sitting in front of your
> > monitor forever.
> 
> Yes.  DVDs and CDs aren't great for lots of little files (really slow
> seek speed, slow read speed), but are reasonable for large files where
> the slow seek speed comes into the equation less often.  And, depending
> on how you put the files on the disc, you'd have to correct all the
> changed ownerships, file permissions, and SELinux contexts.  And you'd
> have to do it as root to be able to access all the files you want to
> backup, and the same when you restore them, later on.
> 
> My suggestion about tarring (or otherwise archiving the files), puts all
> that ownership, permissions, and file context information within the
> archive, where it can be restored as the files are extracted.
> 
> Though a gotcha with that, is people who backup their files, install a
> new system, create a new user by making the same username but not with
> the same numerical user ID, then try to restore their files.  Generally
> speaking, the name is for your benefit, the filesystems go by the ID.

What I had been doing was quite simple.  Rather than doing a compressed
backup, I had just been using a small rsync script to copy my files
and/or changes to my backup partition.  I have a big enough hard drive
with lots of room.  I found that I seldom had need of a restore, but on
several occasions it was helpful to just go to the /backup partition and
directly look at what I had used, or configured before.  Occasionally I
would have need to copy a data file back to my /home partition.

When I came to burning the new disk I wanted to be able to do the same.
It is very unlikely that on my small system, I would need to restore a
file or directory from two or three Fedora versions ago.  But I might
like to look at what I did with some file back then.  If it was a root
file I would switch to root and look at a burned file from there.  So I
wasn't trying to burn a backed up file per se but rather a copied file.
That shouldn't have been a problem I would have thought, unless having
used rsync with accumulated changes makes a difference.



-- 
Regards Bill
Fedora 14, Gnome 2.32
Evo.2.32, Emacs 23.2.1



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