[Eug]

Because I want a secondary backup before the 10.7.3 update and because I have this login icon problem, I'm backing up everything now.

However, for some reason if I try to use Restore in Disk Utility to copy the data drive to the backup it says I can't block copy it. Can't remember the reason. So I tried just drag copying the directories over. It says several of the directories couldn't be copied because I didn't have the right permissions.

How best should I set the permissions? I want to use BatChmod to do this.



Should I just set everything (except Dropbox) to:

Owner: eug RWX
Group: admin R X
Everyone: R X

Dropbox is currently set as below, and I'd leave it the same:

Owner: eug RWX
Everyone: No access

Or for my pictures subdirectory, should I just set everything to:

Owner: eug RWX
Group: admin RWX
Everyone: RWX

I figure setting the pictures subdirectory as RWX for everybody is fine, but I'm not too sure about my Aperture and iTunes directories. Does mucking about with those potentially cause problems?

[Eug]

BTW, I'm using SuperDuper! in the meantime to copy the drive over. How's that these days, in the era of Lion, vs. Carbon Copy Cloner?

I didn't use Disk Utility for the reason mentioned above.

[P]

If you're talking about your system drive,

DON'T BATCH MODIFY THE PERMISSIONS.

For one thing, there are other permissions than read/write/execute, namely the setuid and setgid bits, which may or may not be modified by an action like this. For another, there are files & folders that must not have their permissions changed or the computer won't boot.

Use a cloning app or make a tarball. I think CCC 3.4 works with Lion.

[Eug]

This is not my boot disk. I have my iMac's internal hard disk partitioned into a boot partition and a data partition.

I want to modify the permissions only on the data partition. (My Aperture, Dropbox, and iTunes directories are all on the data partition.)

I wonder if the permissions issue is related to document files I created/used on other machines. Some of those machines don't have "eug" as my user name, so ownership may be under a different username. Plus, the data has been migrated several times over the years from older machines to newer machines, if that makes any difference. It's annoying that when I try to move over certain photo or document subdirectories for example, it fails because of permissions issues. I would then modify permissions on that single subdirectory (or single file in that subdirectory) and it'd work fine, but if I try to copy over an entire disk, I run into the same problem. I presume it's same permissions issue, but I don't want to go through the subdirectories one by one to see which are the offending ones, because that would take me just about forever.

[P]

In that case, just tell the Finder to ignore permissions on that drive. Get Info for the drive and check the box - I'm assuming Lion didn't remove that feature? You can then reenable it when the copy operation is over.

I'm very wary of big recursive chmod operations. I would much rather try to find the offending files and correct them selectively.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

The find cli command will search by permissions
Linux Commands - A practical reference examples.

[P]

So will Spotlight from the Finder. Add a few extra lines of options, select "Owner" as the thing to search for (it's in the list under "Other") and search for anything not your own userid or root.