If you start at / and cp -a you copy all the device files too. Strange things can happen. At least on my system. I burned myself that way once. Try just cp -a $HOME $targetDir (you don't need -R) and see if that helps.=======milgram@cgpp.com301-257-7069------ Original message------From: linux-audio@terrier.ampexguy.comDate: Tue, Nov 17, 2020 16:09To: UM-LINUX@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU;Cc: Subject:[UM-LINUX] cp/backup oddityI wonder if anyone can shed light on the following.Background:My desktop system has a 2 TB hard drive installed that df says is 85% full. For several years I've had a 2 TB USB hard drive I've used for backup. My sophisticated backup method employs "cp -a -R" and whatever needs to follow that. (<== That's a joke about it being sophisticated.) It has worked fine for me.Since the 2 TB USB drive is also pretty full, I recently ordered a 5 TB drive. When I plugged it in and tried to mount it, mount identified it as/dev/sdf1 on /run/media/howard/Elements type fusebl k [etc.] To my surprise I could write to and read from that filesystem type, so I didn't reformat it as ext3, chiefly because I thought maybe that way it would be compatible with a Windows 7 laptop I inherited when a friend died.At that point I did the following in a shell window:su rootcd /cp -a -R * /run/media/howard/ElementsThe intended effect was to copy all of the 2 TB drive in the desktop system to the 5 TB USB drive. About 36 hrs. later it was still running, with only about 500 GB of space left on the 5 TB USB drive. So, obviously, it copied something waaaay more than once.l /run/media/howard/Elements doesn't show anything unexpected. So does anyone have any idea what happened?Thanks.HowardYou received this email because you are subscribed to the UM Linux User's Group (UM-LINUX) mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe from this list, simply send an email to lists...@listserv.umd.edu with the message signoff UM-LINUX in the body.
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