Hi,
Richard Owlett wrote:
cp -ax / "/media/richard/MISC
backups/dev_sda14/"
cp: cannot stat '/media/richard/MISC
...
File name too long
You tell cp to copy / including its sub tree /media/richard/... which is
the target of the copy process. So as soon as reading reaches that tree
it begins to copy itself into itself endlessly until it bonks against
a filesystem limit.
You need to exclude the target directory from being copied.
E.g. by not giving "/" as copy source but rather all its files and
directories except "/media".