Cp -ar to vfat USB stick does not work properly

I have 30GB vfat USB stick.

I want to copy (cp -ar)a folder with 2.3GB of data to that USB stick, but the copy process does not work properly.
The directory tree is not copied correctly.

rsync -ahr does work.

Hello @Keruskerfuerst :slight_smile:

So you want to preserve symlinks and copy files recursively?

Example?

As I know, vfat has no support for symlinks/hardlinks. The only thing what you could really preserve there are timestamps and names. vfat has no ACL support.

1 Like

I want to copy recursively.

Here is an example:

(system, home dir, documents) Folder A contains folder B and folder C.

Is copied as follows:
(root dir of USB stick) Folder A contains folder B , but folder C is in root dir of USB stick.

try this:

cp --verbose \
--recursive \
--update \
--preserve=timestamps \
/usb/folderA/ /system/folderA/