I just bought a 320GB USB/SATA External Hard Drive (HD2Go). I would like to use it to backup my Fedora 5 Server which has MySQL and a pile of other stuff on it. It's aii on a 120GB Drive.

I don't have a backup tape, so it would be nice if I could back it up to this USB Drive as the current drive is starting to get old.

The USB drive comes preformatted (probably NTFS or FAT32). I don't want to 'fiddle' with it and destroy it or my Linux box, so if anyone can help, it would be appreciated.

1. Do I need to reformat the drive - if so how?
2. What would be the best way to backup, rsync, an imaging utility or what is out there that will give me a workable backup / image without it costing me an arm and a leg?
3. Anything else which would help.

I think you should ext3 format your drive (or at least make a ext3 partition on it) and copy there your / . (just doing this shouldn't destroy your drive!
I'd recommend use the cp command, see 'man cp' ...
you could make an script to backup automatically.
to manage partitions gparted is a good program. if you'd rather just format all the disk, 'mkfs.ext3' would be the way to go.

Thanks, that solves the formatting problem, but isn't there anything out there that I could use to make an image of the system - something like Ghost?

I know on a Windows box, copying doesn't work very well, because there are a lot of files it just won't copy. Isn't this the same on Linux?

Ok. what you need is "dd". see here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506
you can make an image of your partitions and gzip or .tar.gz it...

You would also write a script which does that and mirrors it where you want... You can stick the script in /etc/cron.weekly and then forget about it, for automatic weekly backups.

=)