How do I preserve ownership permissions when copying to an external volume?

Posted by Yitzchak on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Yitzchak
Published on 2012-03-25T17:16:46Z Indexed on 2012/03/25 17:33 UTC
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linux

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backup

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permissions

When I upgrade or reinstall linux I backup my home folder by running sudo cp -pr /home/users/yitzchak /media/externalHDD/backups. When I do this I get errors saying that permissions could not be preserved and when I copy the folder back onto my local disk I see that ownership has been changed to root and I have to chown all of them back, which has to be done manually piecemeal because not all files have the same group. Is there any way around that?

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