How to add and remove an external FAT32 usb drive to RHEL server
 

I need to get a backup copy of a huge directory on one of our RHEL servers. Rather than hook the external USB drive up to my PC and manually copy it all across the network, can I just plug it in to one of my USB ports on the server and rsync it?

I know how to do the rsync, I just don't know how to get the USB drive to show up when I do a df -h and how to properly remove it before unplugging it from the server. this is a live server, so I can't go playing around and possibly mess something up. Can anyone help?

Yes, rsync works either over the network or between local folders. Now this server, is it running a linux or not? To rsync local you have need to --

1. Plug the USB disk, the system must be able to detect it;
2. Mount the disk; check Options must allow an 'rw' permission to write the back up to it, there must be enough space too;
3. Rsync.... (be sure about your Source and Destination disks)

Hope it helps.

You shouldn't have to do that.
Why not edit it into /etc/fstab?

Couple things. One, I only have access to the CLI, no gui on the server.

It's a FAT32 USB drive, 1TB, so it should recognize it I think. The server I want to plug it into is RHEL5.

I'm still at a loss on how to do this.

You can specify fat32 when you mount it.

My problem is I don't know how to mount or unmount it properly in RHEL's command line. I can do it on my XP PC, but Linux I'm clueless.

Try this:
replace ?? with the letter and partition of your usb drive. Try fdisk -l if your not sure.

OK, so I plug the USB drive into my server, then do a fdisk -l to find out what dev it is. then I do mount -tvfat /dev/sd?? /directory

the folder structure was created on my XP PC, so would the directory path be the same as if i went through a windows command prompt or something similar?

Then how do i unmount?

Yep! ex:
Then to unmount its

Thanks, I'll give it a shot, I'll let you know how it went.

Mount: mount point /usbdrive does not exist

What do I do now?

Also, under fdisk for the usb drive, it lists sdd1 and sdd5, assuming I want the fat32 and not ext'd (lba)

then mount it again.

try sdd1 first, if that doesn't have your files, use sdd5

does it matter if i do the mkdir as mkdir /usbdrive or mkdir /dev/usbdrive or mkdir /home/username/usbdrive? is one better or one a huge problem?