[clug] syncing via a USB memory stick

[Ian McCulloch]

Hi,

I've been googling around for an 'idiot's guide to USB memory sticks', but 
I havn't found one yet.  Or rather, I've found lots, but they havn't 
helped ;-(

I recently bought a USB memory stick, which I want to use for syncing my 
home directory between my home machine and my desktop at work - mostly a 
stopgap measure until I get an internet connection at home.

I put an ext2 filesystem on the memory stick, and rsync'ed the relevant 
directories from my home machine.  Now, I can rsync onto my work machine, 
but I have a different uid so I can't rsync back from my work machine to 
the memory stick - I don't have the root password so rsync fails to 
chown/chmod, and I don't want to make all my files ugo+wr.

I can't think of any really good solution for this, the only ideas I have 
are ugly, such as changing my uid on my desktop machine to 
be the same as my uid at work.  Or, I could have two top level directories 
on the memory stick, one for each user, and juggle them around.  Or forget 
about rsync and just make a fresh tarball each time.  Or use a brain-dead 
filesystem (fat16?) that doesn't have uid/gid fields, but then I guess I 
lose all other permissions as well.

What am I missing?

Cheers,
Ian