Newbie can't figure out error messages

[Matt McCutchen]

On 1/16/07, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> I am trying to use rsync to create a mirror of my Linux laptop (Ubuntu
> Dapper amd-64) onto a USB drive hanging on a Windows 2000 desktop over
> ethernet.

> rsync: mknod "/media/smb/laptop/dev/.static/dev/.static/dev/rfcomm74" failed: Operation not permitted (1) rsync: symlink
> "/media/smb/laptop/dev/.static/dev/.static/dev/sr0" -> "scd0" failed: Operation not permitted (1)

The trouble is that some aspects of your Linux laptop's filesystem,
including device nodes and symlinks, cannot be represented on the USB
drive through SMB.  If this is a problem (e.g., if you want to be able
to restore the entire laptop from the USB drive and have it work), I
can think of two options you might try:

(1) Attach the USB drive directly to the laptop, create a Linux
filesystem on the drive (e.g., ext3 or reiserfs), and back up the
laptop to that filesystem with rsync.

(2) Store a tar file of the laptop into the SMB share, in which case
all the Linux-specific metadata is contained in the tar file and no
special help is needed from SMB:
tar -zcf /media/smb/laptop.tar.gz --anchored --exclude=/proc --exclude=/media /

Matt