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 probably  a 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 in  the 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 the  32 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
--

try 'cp -a'
the -a does -cdpR, a stands for archive
-c prreserve=context
-d do not dereference symbolic links
-p preserve=mode  which is ownership and timestamps
-R recursive