On 9/5/2016 7:46 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 9:30 PM Richard Owlett <rowl...@cloud85.net <mailto:rowl...@cloud85.net>> wrote: I attempted to copy contents of one partition to another using cp -R /media/richard/myrepo /media/richard/test /media/richard/myrepo is a hard disk partition /media/richard/test is a USB flash drive I received "illegal operation" error messages as symbolic links were encountered. "man cp" was too terse to be illuminating. I think cp -a is your best bet. It will copy everything, shouldn't choke on links, and will also set permissions etc correctly on the target device, assuming you have permissions to do so (you should be doing the copy as root, always assuming you want to keep permissions and access modes intact). I recently used it to copy hard disk partitions to a replacement SSD (some discussions about that are in the archives of this list) and it worked just dandy. Mark
"archive" had brought up mental image of dusty back rooms where things were being preserved for posterity. Not making a copy to actually be used.
Someone had suggested rsync but that has too many options for me to bungle. "cp" may be slower but appears more comfortable.
Thanks to all.
