Back in the old DOS days there were a couple of wonderful
and fast file manager programs. One was Xtree Gold and the other
was Norton Commander. I just found the free Linux version
called Midnight Commander and I can't explain to you how happy I am.
It down loaded and installed itself in less than 5 minutes.
Without tools like this I could never run this newsletter.
The search function in Linux is probablya 1000 times
faster than the one in Windows. I have well over 500,000
files.
Paul Lamar
--

Paul,
What flavor of Linux do you run?
Bruce Smith
I run Fedora 8 on the desk top and something else inthe EeePC
net book.
I discovered last night the command line back up works
much much much better and faster then the gui copy or
midnight commander.
cp -R /xxxx *.* /media/zzzz

Where zzzz is the name of the32 gig USB stick or USB
hard drive. This simple command completely replicates the tree structure
and all files in it. It usually takes a half a day to back up
my computer.
Paul Lamar

Hi Paul,

You might take a look at rsync for backup.It's a bit more versatile
than cp.I use two or three usb disks as the backup media. the command
I use for backup is:
rsync -av --exclude .gvfs --delete /home /media/disk

-a - archive which keeps all owner and date data related to the file
intact.Same thing you're doing with -R for the cp command.

-v - verbose so it's easier to follow progress

--exclude .gvfs is only necessary if using Gnome.It's a directory for
some sort of virtual file system support in Gnome but creates errors.
It's always empty when I look in it anyway.

--delete will remove a file on the destination if it has been deleted on
the source.leave it off and all the files you've erased will stay on
the backup.

/home will copy all file in the home directory to
/media/disk which is the place usb disks are mounted automatically.If
you mount more than one disk in different orders, be sure to use the
right one.

Once the first backup is done, subsequent backups to the same media only
have to write files that are newer so it speeds things up quite a
bit. Do man rsync to see all the options.

Bob W.