filesystems, permissions question

[sjewins]

Hi;

I have drive with XP and a drive with openSUSE 11.

I have an external USB drive formatted ntfs.

Using rsync I copy my openSUSE drive to the external.

While in Linux I copy my XP drive (from mounted points) to the external.

My question is, if I use the -a argument with rsync will file permissions be maintained for the openSUSE backup on an ntfs drive, for if/when I copy them back?

Conversely, if I were to format the external drive as ext3 and carry out the same actions as above would the XP data copied to an external ext3 and then back be solid?

Simon
(wishing the world had only one filesystem)

[gogalthorp]

I don't think so. You would need to put the files in a package of some sort.
Like TAR to preserve the ownership relations.

[sjewins]

Thanks very much. I was afraid of that.

I guess I will create two partitions, one for linux and one for xp.

Cheers,
Simon