Ensure 'Ignore Ownership' is not enabled on backup drives

May 27, '03 09:15:00AM

Contributed by: luhmann

I just had my iBook repaired by Apple and they replaced the hard drive - which should have been fine, since I made a working backup with psync to a FireWire drive, but it wasn't! When I restored from the backup, the resulting system would not boot. I had to run "Repair Permissions" from the OS X CD first. I couldn't figure out why psync was working one way (I can boot from the firewire drive just fine), but not the other. Then, looking around the web, I found this little bit of advice on Mike Bombich's How to Create a Bootable Backup of Mac OS X page:

Make sure the "Ignore privileges on this volume" setting is not checked for your source or target volume (Note: this setting is called "Ignore ownership on this volume" in Jaguar). To check this setting, click on the target volume, choose "Show Info" or "Get Info" from the File menu in the Finder and select the Privileges menu (Jaguar: click the disclosure triangle next to ownership and permissions). Make sure the box at the bottom is NOT checked, otherwise permissions and ownership settings will not be preserved, no matter what tool you use to copy files."
To be honest, I can't verify that this is what caused the problem, since I didn't try doing a new backup and restore after I got everything working; but it seems like good advice nonetheless!

Interestingly, even after I fixed the permissions, I still had a strange problem where the volume could not be adjusted. It was stuck at the minimum setting. Because of this one little problem, I had to reinstall the OS, even though everything else was working fine!

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