OK, Slackware 12, no xcdrecord, so use K3b to do a back up. Hm, nice back up, no content in directories! Arrggh! Read manual, not worth a hoot, not a word about recursive copy. Arrgghh! Look at all the options, fiddle around, give up.

Is there some magical mystical setting somewhere that will cause K3b to do a recursive copy of a directory structure?

Could you give a better explanation of what you are trying to do?

OK, I'm trying to recursively burn the content of a directory and subdirectories; let's say my user account is /home/trona and I want to make a back up of the entire tree (without selecting every single file manually), including all subdirectories and their content. I can't figure out how to tell K3b to do that -- it creates the directories, but they're empty.

I figure there's got to be a way, but darned if I can find how to do it.

Thanks.

That's strange - normally k3b will copy all subdirs recursively. I'm not sure about hidden files though, but I think there's a switch for that.

I finally figured out that I wasn't doing it right (big surprise there).

Seems you need to "Add Hidden Files" and "Add Link to Project" so the utility will actually add directories and files.

So, all is well that ends.

Thanks for the responses.

Glad you figured that out, and thanks for posting the solution. Now someone else searching who finds your thread will know what to do.

There might be other ways to do this more efficiently than K3B, depending upon your desired output. Are you burning these to a CD/DVD, or just copying them to another location for backup?

I'm burning to a CD-ROM; I also copy (with scp -rp ...) to another machine, but want a periodic CD-ROM "just in case." I've a Dell Dimension 8400 that, so far, has gone though two SATA drives (one Seagate, one Maxtor) that have up and decided to quit after not too long in operation. So, rather than having to rebuild from complete scratch again...

I do not back up the distribution or anything else that I have or can download source code for; I do back up Slackware patches (/usr/local/patches) and any packages I've gotten from, say, Robby Workman's site (thank you once again, Robby) or that I've built with checkinstall just because, well, it's easier that downloading OpenOffice. I back up some of the stuff in /etc that I've had to configure, I back up user directories (because they contain the actual work done by folk, especially me). The one that really concerns me (simply because I have not actually figured out how to do it) is VMWare where I have an XP installation and, brother and sisters, I do not want to ever reinstall XP on anything again during this lifetime (lordy, there are far too many "updates" to get through for something I only use when I absolutely have no choice) -- what a pain. I just haven't actually tried to restore VMWare from a snapshot, although I do periodically (like after Patch Tuesdays) burn those to a CD-ROM.

It would probably be better if I did a "level 0," followed by incremental back ups, but I don't have large enough media to do so (it's a CD-ROM, not a DVD... yet) as I have done for years with find-tar or find-cpio but, for now, what I'm doing will do it.