OT: Copy NTFS based files between servers AND retaining permission intact

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 9:15 PM, William Muriithi
<william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Lennart, I actually toyed with the idea of using live CD and then use
> rsync, and certain it would keep the posix permissions very reliably.
> Question is, does this apply to NTFS permission too? Google could not
> find me an answer for that from reliable source, so I let the idea go.

It's not obvious to me what it'd do.

I was copying stuff yesterday onto an SD card, using Unison, and ran
into a permissions problem that's not unlike this.

The filesystem is FAT, so the permission bits are fairly simulated.

I started with eBooks on my machine's disk.  They had typical sorts of
mixed permissions; something like 0600.

Unison tried duplicating that onto the FAT filesystem, and obviously
couldn't, as it only has 2-ish bits to play with.  Unfortunately, at
that point, Unison threw up its hands in despair, and declined to copy
the files.  I had to fiddle the permissions by hand to get the files
to copy.

It's possible that rsync could get things right if copying "same to
same" (e.g. - Unix to Unix, NTFS to NTFS, and such), but getting it
wrong is certainly plausible.

And note that I'm not notably irritated with Unison folk over my
experience; what "should" be done isn't particularly obvious.  The
"reject that file" option that they picked *was* one of the valid
choices; it has the merit that I wouldn't find security invisibly
diminished by virtue of the permissions having been silently opened
up.
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists