rsync - Jan 2010 - cannot backup to external disk with rsync, create hard links of add w permissions

Dear rsync users,

I want to backup my Documents directory and instead of copying everything to
my external disk I tried to use this command line to create an incremental
backup with rsync on my external disk:

$cd /media/My\ Passport
$rsync -a --delete --link-dest=../BackUp08.2009_Ubuntu/
/home/thomas2/Documents/ BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/


but I get the following output:


rsync: chgrp "/media/My Passport/BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/." failed:
Operation
not permitted (1)
rsync: chgrp "/media/My
Passport/BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/Cealign-0.8-RBS.zip"
failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: chgrp "/media/My
Passport/BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/Cytoscape_2_6_3_unix.sh" failed: Operation
not
permitted (1)
rsync: chgrp "/media/My
Passport/BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/Dendroscope_unix_2_3.sh" failed: Operation
not
permitted (1)
rsync: chgrp "/media/My
Passport/BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/NAMD_CVS_Linux-x86_64-CUDA.tar.gz" failed:
Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: chgrp "/media/My
Passport/BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/PfMDR1_AAA1.fasta"
failed: Operation not permitted (1)
......


Moreover when I try to create hard links from an older backup in my external
disk with the following command line:

cp -al BackUp08.2009_Ubuntu/Reduce/reduce.3.13.080428.linuxi386
BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/
cp: cannot create link `BackUp01.2010_Ubuntu/reduce.3.13.080428.linuxi386':
Operation not permitted

I also tried to use sudo, even login as root with "sudo su" but
didn't make
any difference. The permissions of my external disk are the following and
cannot add write privileges:

drwxr-xr-x 22 thomas2 root 32768 2010-01-13 04:18 My Passport

Is this normal? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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On Wed 13 Jan 2010, Thomas Evangelidis wrote:
> I want to backup my Documents directory and instead of copying everything
to
> my external disk I tried to use this command line to create an incremental
> backup with rsync on my external disk:
You _did_ format the external disk with a filesystem that understands
hardlinks, yes? Such disks usually come preformatted with FAT which
doesn't support many Unix concepts.


Paul