Linux: How do I backup my user files from the live CD?

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Right, I did some updates last night and it messed up my install of KDE Neon, gave me a kernel panic error: not syncing vfs: unknown mount 0, 0 etc...

After spending all night and this morning trying to fix the vfs error, I have had no luck. I managed to mount my drive inside the live cd which I booted from and had a go at updating initramfs and grub but all it did was give me errors and for some reason grub was no where to be found anyway?

Anyway, I guess I'm going to have to accept everything is too far gone now and wish to just backup all my data and reinstall.

My problem is I want to backup certain directories such as /home/user/.config but it won't let me because of permission issues.

If I wanted to backup to my USB what can I do here?

hhfy62

Posted 2017-08-17T11:04:31.740

Reputation: 1

If you run all commands as sudo then it should be able to give you access regardless. Mount your broken volume as read only and mount your USB as read/write and you should be able to copy everything off... – Kinnectus – 2017-08-17T11:15:31.810

But as I'm accessing the FS from the live CD it says im not the user, so I cannot access it? – hhfy62 – 2017-08-17T11:20:29.470

A Linux LiveCD should still be able to mount and access volumes using sudo... – Kinnectus – 2017-08-17T11:39:03.800

When I try and backup the .config dir it says omitting '.config' ? – hhfy62 – 2017-08-17T11:42:45.447

Even when using sudo? – Kinnectus – 2017-08-17T11:44:06.060

Yeah sudo cp .config /media/ubuntu/Storage is what I use? – hhfy62 – 2017-08-17T11:45:00.310

Try this answer: https://askubuntu.com/questions/35779/what-does-cp-omitting-directory-mean - You may be missing -r from your cp command. -r tells cp to use recursive copying and take directories.

– Kinnectus – 2017-08-17T11:45:23.327

Answers

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As taken verbatim from AskUbuntu answer "What does "cp: omitting directory" mean?":

By default, cp copies only the direct files in, and not subdirectories in the directory. The message cp: omitting directory 'directory' warns you that the mentioned directory is not copied.

To do so, specify the -r (or --recursive) option:

sudo cp -r ~/Transfers/ZendFramework-1.11.4-minimal/library/Zend/* ~/public_html/cmsk.dev/library/

The manual page (command: man cp) contains an overview of the available options.

Kinnectus

Posted 2017-08-17T11:04:31.740

Reputation: 9 411