ext3 and FAT32 don’t mix
I was backing up my work computer, which is running Gentoo with the ext3 file system, to my portable hard drive when I noticed a bunch of errors when rsync was done backing everything up: unable to chown.
I sat back and thought for a second, “what is going on here?” Then it hit me: I use the portable drive on multiple machines, so I had formatted it as FAT32 to give it the most compatability. Usually when I do a backup it is to another Unix-like machine, so the permissions are preserved.
I left the files as-is on the backup drive, since I was only getting my home directory and I down care what state the files are in as long as I have a spare set. Next time I’ll remember to use tar, which will preserve ownership and permissions when ran as root.