Well, I have been busy getting child #4 off on her way to college (joining #2). So now it is quite with just the 2 youngest and I can get work done again!. tar stops as follows: /root/.nautilus/metafiles/x-nautilus-desktop:%2F%2F52F.xml tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. I thought perhaps this is some file locked becuase I was running from a terminal session in gnome. So I switched over to init 3 and ran the tar process from the text session. Still got this error. How do I figure out what is wrong and how do I find any similar show-stoppers?