On Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:42:00 +0000, Sharon Kimble wrote: > Tonight at midnight my backup of my home directory failed, and on > investigation why it couldn't make a directory i found that i didn’t > have the right permissions. On further checking I found that the > ownership had reverted to root:root, so I rebooted. (...) You can try with the advice I've gave you. Besides, check your dmesg and/or boot logs. Greetings, -- Camaleón