First, I have checked the drive with smartmon tools and it is not a hardware issue. The other day, I could not delete some of the images made by Clonezilla as it kept telling me I did not have permission to the drive. So changed the drive’s permissions to allow that. Whereas before it was owned by /root:
Now I see that Timeshift, which was also using the drive (and driving me crazy with its constant mounting to make the snapshots and not unmounting from /run/timeshift… once completed), has all the folders for snapshots there, but each says 0 bytes, nothing in them.
When I ran the following command, here is the output indicating input/output error:
That drive mounted at /media/myviolinsings/Linux Acer ES2 is my ext HDD that I use for all of my /home & image backups for MX Linux.
My question is this; if I changed the permission to be able to remove Clonezilla images (which take up a lot of space), is that what is causing issues with TS? And if so, how would I change that so that TimeShift will continue making snapshots?
Oy-vey, I need a better method of making system snapshots onto ext HDD, not something that takes over ownership and causes me issues. I pray that the snapshots are not really gone, but what else would cause them to not show up where they have always been?
Nice guess.
I think you may find Sheila will get away with the blanks in the File Manager gui, but on the CLI she will have to put the filename in single quotes.
Sheila, you should change that drive back to root ownership. Use sudo or be root if you want to delete CZ images.
Do all backups as root… othewise they will not be able to access some files.
I know… you cant start the File Manager as root… you have to use the CLI…
I don’t remember the other access for sure, but I think it was /root read/write and then me as user group, but read only?
I just wasn’t sure if when I chown -R I only use one level to change that from me to /root. Then the rest of the levels will still allow me to access read/write to the drive?
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 Feb 6 19:08 /dev/sda2
root@mx--acer:~# ls -l /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 Feb 6 19:08 /dev/sda
But it’s a moot point for now as I can’t chown without getting same input/output error message that TS gave me.
I am running the smartctl on it now, but that will take awhile. It took awhile when I ran it the other day to ensure that error message does not mean the drive is failing. I do not have, on hand, another 4 TB drive to move things to, and that’s even if I can since everytime I try to copy something from the drive, with me as owner, I get the Input/output error message.
So if the disk is ok, why am I getting input/output errors when properties show I am the owner with r/w permissions? Why can’t I even copy those files/images to another drive without that error?
I never even thought of that. I will boot into Garuda and see what’s up and try a live session. Cause I just made a new 350GB partition on the ext SSD and I could at least copy my /home partition to that for safety and the latest CZ image of MX.
Would you believe this worked? SHEESH! Timeshift now sees the drive, I can right click and cut or copy files on it…LOL. AND all of the old snapshots are back (I knew they weren’t gone)
Maybe export a list of installed packages, just for reference when installing the new system: apt list --installed
(No sudo needed for that).
Maybe apt list --installed | grep -v auto
That theoretically excludes automatically installed packages.
Do an inline upgrade of MX to the same version.
That should do the equivalent of a fresh install, but without losing all your installed apps.
Be prepared for it to fail… I have never done an inline upgrade with MX, but there is a tool.
