permissions

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 12:40:35PM -0400, Mr Chris Aitken wrote:
> First of all, every time I have asked for help with permissions problems 
> I'm offered a couple of things to try which don't work, then no more help...
> 
> Of course, I'm not complaining (as no one's getting paid here). The 
> reason I mention this is I want to know if I am not framing the 
> questions properly or if permissions problems are just too complex and 
> varying to hope that list help would be enough.
> 
> Assuming it *is* possible to troubleshoot this via list help, here is my 
> latest permissions problem: I have lost permission on my regular user 
> account to even open a terminal. Icons have turned to red 'X's. Clearly 
> I have so offended su and sudo that the system is shutting me out.
> 
> How I got myself in this jam: I use scp to backup data from computer to 
> computer:
> 
> scp -r /home/thatpc/datatobackup 192.168.0.5:/otherpcbckupdrv
> 
> and
> 
> scp -r 192.168.0.5:/home/user/doc2bckup /bckupdrv
> 
> It may not be pretty but it backs up the data from machine to machine.
> 
> The problem is when I try to delete the backed up files (from time to 
> time for various reasons). I don't have the permissions to do the 
> deletes. So, I tried giving ownership to the regular user via 'sudo 
> chown user otherpcbckupdrv'. I still couldn't delete files (because of 
> parent directory permission), so I ran 'sudo chown user /'. The system 
> got mad at me and now I've pooched the system in the house I've spent 
> the most time on (especially gtkpod actually working with the iPod).
> 
> Please be careful with your suggestions to me. I suck at this stuff and 
> it has *always* ended up with a re-install (after the helper is suddenly 
> incommunicado).

rsync can keep permissions, which scp does not.  It also only copies
changes rather than everything each time.  Way more efficient and it
still runs over ssh.  Simply changing 'scp -r' to 'rsync -a' should work
in general.  More advanced options like --delete might be nice if you
want it to remove files from the backup which are no longer on the
source machine.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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