Question about ownership

R

RustyHull

Registered
Hello all,

I am currently in the process of backing up the home folders on my iMac onto an firewire drive, in preparation for Panther (when I will be wiping the main HD clean for a fresh install).

My question is this, as the files/folders being backed up are owned by three different users, do I need to change anything to be able to access them when Panther is running? For example, say I have a folder owned by 'jblogg' and a I create a new user in Panther called 'jblogg', will it be able to access the folder?

Thanks in advance,
Russell
 
It should be able to, I don't see why not... if not, simply repair the permission settings afterward.

Also, if you have Classic installed, back up your System Folder (the one with a 9 on it) and simply copy it back so you don't have to worry about trying to reinstall Classic.
 
That depends on a few things though... Doesn't OS X (*nix) determine file ownership by the user's UID (the #) not the username?

If so, you'll have to re-create your old users on Panther with the same UID numbers, or you mightl get permissions errors: jblogg with UID 505 on the FW disk isn't necessarily the same jblogg with UID 506 on your Panther's NI database.

I'm not sure how Repair Permissions will help that since it doesn't know that the files on the FW disk jblogg UID 505 are the same as jblogg UID 506, so it can't repair those permissions, right? (You can change the UIDs in Panther with NetInfo Manager, umm I'm assuming, I've never used Panther but I assume it's the same as Jag's permissions configs).

Now, I might be totally wrong about that, if I am someone correct me please!

Regardless, the absolute worst-case permissions scenario would be that you'd have to spend 5 seconds typing
sudo chown jblogg:staff /Volumes/backup/username/
which isn't really a disaster :p With a sudo-able account you always have access to everything. Or you could always check the "Ignore permissions on this volunme" in the Finder hehe.
 
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