I didn't know and still don't know how to make large-data backups. I just copied over data via Ethernet connections to other machines connected to external hard drives. Making a clone with the system settings was something that was difficult for me to do and still is. I asked so many of my IT people over the years, and they thought it was a project. In fact, that is my next step now that I have one machine running again. My plan is to attach a Sata Drive via my USB-to-Sata connector. I'm using older style internal hard drives, because I don't think RHEL 3 recognizes the new NTFS formatted external disks on the market. And if I tried to reformat with FAT32, I'll run into the 32-Gig limit problem. Then, I will manually mount it and try one of the "dd" commands that were posted early in this thread. Is that the best way?

I heard from some of the creators of my field-specific programs. It seems that people have migrated to linux on 64-bit machines for the 3D-graphics. I'll have to buy a new machine, hopefully install my old Quadro FX -gl card, and try now with RHEL 7.1. So much for making use of the old Dells...

For those who were interested, below is a link to my new publication. It will be freely assessable for 50 days apparently. Fig 4 is where I use a NVIDIA Quadro FX -gl card to support 3D-modeling of protein molecules. These molecules I hand built atom-by-atom into X-ray data that gives me an electron-density cloud of the linked atoms, using 3D-goggles. The assembled structure then goes into another program for recursive computational refinement (i.e. energy minimization), and then another program to make those pretty simplified pictures that I illustrate in the figure. The field is called X-ray crystallography.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...04416515000768