Question about back-ups

[utherpendragonfly]

I have a really simple question: How do I make a backup of /home directory which includes my administrator account and one other user account without getting permissions errors for the other user account? I've spent hours searching and have not found an intelligible answer.

With Linux Mint I've been using Grsync to make a backup of /home to an external HD. For a single user it works great. But because I have a second user account, there are always permissions errors from the other user account (my wife's) and I've had to manually open her .mozilla directory by right-clicking and doing 'open as root' so I can copy her Firefox and e-mail settings to the backup. But with Pinguy OS there is no option to 'open as root', only 'open as administrator' which will not give me permission to copy her information.
Does anyone know if there's a way I can 'open as root' without having to us the CLI to 'sudo chown' to copy her files, and then have to change permissions back to my wife's account again.
Or better, how can I use Grsync  to do this without errors?
Or would Deja Dup work better?

[utherpendragonfly]

And whether I mark 'preserve permissions' and 'preserve owner' or not, I still get the errors.


rsync: opendir "/home/.Trash-0" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/lost+found" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: readlink_stat("/home/steph/.gvfs") failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.adobe" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.cache/chromium" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.cache/compizconfig" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.cache/wallpaper" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.config/chromium" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.dbus" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.gconfd" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.gnome2/evince" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.gnome2/keyrings" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.gnome2_private" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.local/share/Trash/expunged" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.macromedia" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.mozilla/firefox/Crash Reports" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.openoffice.org/3" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.pki" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.pulse" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.thumbnails" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/home/steph/.thunderbird" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1060) [sender=3.0.7]

[utherpendragonfly]

Well, I think I found my problem. I just needed to open Grsync as root in the terminal. Then I ran the simulation and only got one error, but everything seems to have synced with my wife's account's user settings. Although when I checked Properties>Permissions on some of her files it said I was the owner. That doesn't seem right.
So I did 'sudo chown -R user:group /home/user' for her home directory. I hope I didn't screw something up.