Peter Vollebregt wrote:
ET schreef:
Adriano Varoli Piazza wrote:
2006/2/10, Rosemary McGillicuddy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
As a side note, it's probably a good idea to copy your entire /home
folder to an alternate location for safe storage. backups are all
fine
and well, but when you're trying to retrieve a one or two files,
having
a regular copy is always a fast method.
Again - how is this done please?
The easy way:
. open your root folder in nautilus / konqueror / the file manager of
your choice.
since in the default install with normal file permissions, you won't
be able to copy enter or read other users /home/~, you might ought to
start off with opening a text console (a.k.a. 'term'), type 'su'
(without the quotes) it will ask for a password, give it the root
users password and then (also without the quotes) type "konqueror".
this will give you a konqueror file manager window with root
permissions, able to read and write to anywhere root could write to.
Konqueror has the nasty habit though to change the file owner when
copying (so it will become root). Apart from wanting to keep the dates
and symbolic links this is the reason i prefer to tar (and zip) as follows:
- open konsole
- su -
- (enter root password)
- tar -pcvzf /home.tgz /home/ (this will create the file home.tgz)
- This can be opened with ark or extracted somewhere else with tar (see
man tar)
I normally open the file with konqueror (ark) and drag the portion i
want somewhere
where i want to have it.
otherwise use the cp command with the -p switch to keep the ownership
and dates.
Peter
Sorry, I've been away for a day or two. I should have mentioned in my
original post about permissions, when I suggested copying or backing up
'/home' folders, so I hope my suggestion didn't screw anyone's data up.
As a follow-up to that, I'd like to suggest a couple of things.
The first suggestion - for those who prefer using GUI's to do backups -
is a neat little app called 'kdar' which allows you to back up your
entire home folder (ie; /home/username) and the second suggestion would
be DrakBackup, since it can run in the background and is capable of
doing incremental backups, thereby saving space.
If your home folder is very large, you could also consider a remote
mount point to another PC or server (if available), which could then be
used by DrakBackup as a storage location.
Alternately, an external USB drive with sufficient capacity or a DVD
burner could be used to store your most critical files. Personally, I
prefer to leave my config files in an uncompressed (unzipped) format so
that I can easily copy/paste them from system to system, but that's the
nature of my business, so YMMV.
On a slightly different note, with the standard sizes of hard drives
getting larger (as well as faster and cheaper), it's nice to see that a
few PC manufacturers are finally getting their collective thumbs out of
their butts in respect to partitioning hard drives on Windows systems.
Whenever I'm asked to setup Linux on a Windows-based system, I usually
allow 10 GB's/OS and format the remaining GB's as FAT32 partitions,
which makes that partition the ideal place to store email profiles and
backed up data, which can then be accessed by both OS's. It also means
that I have a large partition where I can easily store backups until
they can be manually transferred to another storage medium.
One thing that strikes me as a bit humorous is the fact that Mandriva
will format FAT32 partitions larger that Microsoft's 32 GB limit when
Windows doesn't or can't. Just another example of Linux doing it better,
I guess.
HTH's
Dan LaBine
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