[xoxoryan]

Hi Y'all,

I may have to send my G4 (older model) laptop back to apple to have some physical problems repaired, so I am attempted to back up my data, work, and programs on a LaCie 160 GB firewire external drive (the new silver brick kind).

The problem is I am having all kinds of problems. My OS is Panther. Whenever I try to copy any files I am getting permission problems which will not let me copy the files to the drive. I ran disk utility to fix permissions, which may have fixed it... though I am not 100% sure, however, I am still running into problems with special characters (i guess you can not use an asterisk anywhere) and that names or characters do not work. This usually happens with files called "icon" which I can only assume refer to invisible files for actual icons as I have no files named icon that I am trying to transfer.

In the meantime I have been making disk images for back up, but it just seems so backwards to do so.

Shouldn't I be able to just drag and drop???

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, ryan

[Dr.Michael]

I am not completely sure if I am right. But I definitely read about permission problems with backups on external drives.

Please check the files that failed to copy and see, if you have the required access permissions.

I would recommend carbon copy cloner as backup software. It works perfect and is FREE (donationware to be precise and definitely worth some money). Really great.

Second: Try to copy as root. In the terminal use sudo or enable root with Netinfomanager and lock in as root afterwards.

Third: Read this article about backups on O'Reilly network.

If all this failes, you really might have a hardware defect.