MEPIS Community Forum

When copying files to a backup directory on a partition that's formatted NTFS, executable files are rendered non-executable. (I found this out when I restored a shell script from the backup location. The script is set to autoexecute on startup, and I was getting errors. When I checked the file's permissions, it was set to non-executable.)

This isn't a major problem because file permissions can be restored manually; however, is there a way to copy files to an NTFS backup location and keep the permissions intact? BTW, I use the backup partition for Windows too, which is why it's formatted NTFS.

This seems like an informative article about permissions under NTFS: http://b.andre.pagesperso-orange.fr/permissions.html

Might explain why my USB drives, one formatted NTFS the othe ext3 have different permissions.

So I guess there's no way to get around losing Linux file permissions, since they are not compatible with NTFS. I don't know if this is common knowledge, but it fooled me.

I noticed another thing: In LuckyBackup, if you check the box labeled "Destination is FAT/NTFS" under Advanced > Command Options, the options labeled "Preserve ownership, times" and "Preserve permissions" are grayed out. I guess this is the reason for that.

hmm... joany, i wonder if using tar to backup your files to the ntfs partition might not take care of that?

tar has a preserve permissions option. in theory, it should be preserving the permissions of the original files. you could also use the owner and group options to set these to something else...

you might not have hot access to the files, but you wouldn't have to worry about the permissions issue...

Your suggestion is certainly worth looking into.