Hi, Richard Owlett wrote: > My goal was to copy root and its sub-directory to a directory on another > physical device.
Well understood. In a slightly different scenario (backup on Blu-ray) i do this several times per day. But i would not dare to give the whole root tree as input to any copying program or backup archiver. Not only because of the risk of stepping on my own foot but also because there are several trees which do not deserve backup or could even make trouble when being fully read. In my root directory that would be: /dev /mnt /proc /run /sys E.g. because of $ ls -l /proc/kcore -r-------- 1 root root 140737477877760 May 7 15:22 /proc/kcore (Somebody else shall try whether it's really readable and what comes out. The announced size is nearly 128 TiB.) Have a nice day :) Thomas