Hi Andrew
I'm sorry about the delay in replying. Soon after sending my first email, I reformatted my flash drive as NTFS and 'rdiff-backup' worked as expected thereafter.
I've listed my responses below yours.
I'm having trouble using rdiff-backup 1.2 to backup from NTFS and Ext3 to a FAT32 flash drive.
I don't have any trouble backing up from Ext3 to FAT32, however, since there is another bug report filed similar to this one, I am willing to believe that there may be a bug here.
However, I think this bug is due to a change in the Linux kernel. What version are you running? I am using 2.6.24-19 (Ubuntu 8.04). The reason I suspect this is that there have been some changes to how the FAT filesystem code handles file permissions.
Right now, I'm using Linux Kernel
2.6.26.3 on Arch Linux.
Also, what are the permissions on the files in /media/Common/Personal/Passwords/ ? The permissions on one of the files or directories in that directory is leading to this problem. Running rdiff-backup with -v5 will tell you exactly which file.
All three files in "/media/Common/Personal/Passwords/" have '770' permissions, because they exist on an NTFS partition. I've done this because Vista is too poxy to recognise Ext3 partitions natively and the related third-party drivers were buggy last time I checked.
I've read the rdiff-backup manual and noticed that I should probably be using the "--override-chars-to-quote" option, but it's not being accepted. I get a very different error message when using this option.
You need to specify the characters to quote, eg: --override-chars-to-quote "A-Z;" will quote all capital letters, plus the quoting character ; ... you should always include the quoting character. In general, you should not need to override the chars-to-quote option since rdiff-backup should determine the correct characters automatically.
Thanks; I'll keep that in mind. I don't need to use the "override-chars-to-quote" option now that my flash drive uses NTFS.
Chris