1
I have a brand new 3TB Western Digital "Elements" external (USB) hard drive. When I copy (cp
, rsync
) stuff across from my laptop file permissions are not preserved. In fact everything (files and directories) is user root, group root and r,w,x by user, group, anyone. chmod
has no effect.
The filesystem is NTFS. However my older 1TB WD Elements hard drives are also NTFS and file permissions are preserved no problem.
Any idea what the issue could be?
Well NTFS is not a unix filesystem. The permission/ownership is sort of "emulated". You can change them with the mount options (uid, gid, umask; also dmask, fmask, usermapping and so if you're using ntfs-3g instead of the kernel driver). – Tom Yan – 2016-03-29T17:38:58.673
1If you want to preserve Unix file permissions will need to reformat the drive with a Unix file system. – AFH – 2016-03-29T17:42:00.067