How come when I backup my /home partition, i sometimes get scrolling messages that tell me that certain files where not copied, and at the end that the / partition has no free space?? This is one of THE quickest ways to make me breakout in a cold sweat!?? I am well aware of rsync and the system backup utilities on 9.0 but still prefer to do a plain cp as it results in a shorter time before the information can be accessed. Below is the procedure I use, which one fine day will find its way into a script: 1) Log off reading Mozilla email in KDE as a regular user 2) Log on to KDE as root 3) Using Konqueror, I click on the desktop icon that is labeled as /data4 4) Once the directory is mounted I delete the /home directory from /data4. 5) When complete I log out of KDE completely, sometimes unmounting /data4 beforehand. 6) I move to TTY1(ie CTRL-ALT-F2) and log on as root. 7) I then enter the command: #> cp -a /home /data4/home 7.1) I also sometimes do #> cp -a /etc /data4/etc to backup etc 8) On completion I shutdown the machine and go to bed. navigate to my backup partition /data4 My trimmed fstab is below to show that /data4 is a separate drive too. The figures at the end represent the partition capacity not its actual size, although the sizes are currently all under 50% of the capacity. /dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 1.9Gb /dev/hdb9 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 45.5Mb /dev/hdd1 /data4 auto noauto,user 0 0 6.9Gb /dev/hdb8 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 5.9Gb /dev/hdb10 /opt ext3 defaults 1 2 3.0Gb /dev/hdb6 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2 3.8Gb /dev/hdb7 /var ext3 defaults 1 2 2.97Gb What is wrong with the steps 1-8? What am I missing? Does /data4 have to be mounted before step 7? Where does the backed up data go if /data4 is not mounted? Does the partition always have to be mounted before copying/accessing data on it, I would think so but when then have some of the backups completed without a hitch?? I've looked at the FHS, help, man and info pages for cp and realize this is a dumb question, but there must be something I'm missing that causes the root file system to become full. -- The cp full Little Helper ======================================================================== Hylton Conacher - Linux user # 229959 at http://counter.li.org Currently using SuSE 9.0 Professional with KDE 3.1 Licenced Windows user ========================================================================