[NTLUG:Discuss] rsync woes

[Ralph Green]

> Well, Preston, I used rsync -a <from> <to> and got back a ton of
> messages, most of which were
>
> rsync: chown "<filemane>" failed: Operation not permitted (1)
>
>
> This was from an operation run from su as root. It may be that all the files

Howdy,
  I think you were trying to rsync to a flash drive that was formatted
as a FAT filesystem.  The file gets copied, and then rsync tries to
set the file ownership and attributes.  That would fail on a FAT
filesystem, because there is nowhere to store the ownership.  Try
formatting the flash drive as ext2 for your backups and you won't have
this problem.  I suggest ext2 because there probably is no need for a
journal on this kind of drive.
Good luck,
Ralph