will someone PLEASE explain to me how to back up my /home/joe directory in case I blow it all up playing around with settings...this should be simple...I have tried 3 different programs and I still cannot do a basic back up.

All I want to do is backup the system to another hard drive. /dev/sdb is 37 Gb with 3 Gb used...I want to back that 3 Gb to /dev/sdc which is 10 GB and empty.

How hard can that be? At this point I am ready to forego the GUI and just use the console. I just need the commands to back up a directory to a different drive and to later restore it.

Took me a long time to get enough information to set up a dialup modem, now, I can't set up a simple backup. I don't understand why these basic utilities are not built into Ubuntu 8.1...I mean , it has everything else I could possibly need, but no backup??

It seems in Ubuntu the hard things are easy and the easy things are hard.

help would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

How about something really simple like
Note that I've assumed that the relevant partition on sdb is sdb1 and that you've mounted it somewhere.

Edit

To restore a file, simply use
where restorefile is the file you want to restore

Ok, I will try that, but, if it's not too much trouble, could you please explain what all the terms mean so that I may learn something here...you know...give a man a fish and he can eat for a day....teach him how to catch a fish a he can eat for a lifetime.

Thanks again.

Better still "man tar"

--selinux - save security context information
-c - create tar file
-j - compress with bzip2
-f - filename following
-C - change directory to following before executing
-x - extract.

I went to the library today and got a linux book....seems that until I can find a good GUI backup program tar is a good answer and what I'll be using for now...thanks again!