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I kept telling myslef for weeks I need to look into this and seen this thread. I have a XP/Suse machine with a partition on the XP drive formatted fat32. The fat32 partition is what I use to backup linux and exchange files with XP. I tried your example above and it still changes the permission on the files. No matter where you go outside of Suse, CD's or other drives it changes the permissions. I was going to look into finding something that would do a backup for me of /home and /etc. Thought I would ask the best approach to take to be sure my data was there when I needed it.
AFAIK FAT32 doesn't understand *NIX style permissions so they will not be kept. If you copy anything across partitions in at least a Windows system, the permissions are lost especially if you are crossing from a NTFS to a FAT32 partitions. The same was true with a NTFS to NTFS copy if it crosses a partition. Someone correct me if this is not correct. I had that part (Win permissions) drilled into me when i took the MCSE exams for the beast known as NT4. -- Marshall "Nothing is impossible, we just do not have all the anwsers to make the impossible, possible."