I have a straightforward need to backup the current system to a portable drive before getting an up to date Debian distribution installed on a new machine.
As previously mentioned, system backups have been successfully carried out on a regular basis for years to an NTFS portable drive in a USB 3 port. Recently there was a problem with the USB 3 port and it was also found that the portable drive had become corrupted. Hence a new NTFS portable drive was bought to do the backups. A backup was attempted using the new drive in another USB port. However the manual mount command failed :- # mount /media/backup Failed to write lock '/dev/sde1': Resource temporarily unavailable Error opening '/dev/sde1': Resource temporarily unavailable Failed to mount '/dev/sde1': Resource temporarily unavailable The drive was unplugged from the port without a manual unmount being performed as it was assumed the drive had not been mounted. Maybe, however, the new drive was automatically mounted by the usbmount system (to /media/usb0 ?) when it was plugged in. In any case the drive should have been manually unmounted before it was unplugged. The above mount command is exactly the same as the mount command used whenever the old drive was mounted. The old drive has an entry in /etc/fstab so the system knew about the mount parameters for the old drive. However the new drive does not have an entry in /etc/fstab and the system would surely be confused by the above mount command. Furthermore, a card reader was then plugged into the port vacated by the new drive. An SD card was then inserted into the card reader. Normally the system would then automatically mount the SD card, but it didn't. Some days later, another card reader was plugged into that port and the SD card inserted into the card reader. This time the card was automatically mounted. So there are several happenings above which I do not really understand. This makes me concerned about how to perform the vital backup needed before a new system can be set up. The backup itself is performed using a 'tar -cvpf' type of command.
