Hi everyone,... I'm a complete Linux
newbie, as I'm sure you'll be able to tell from my posts...

So anyway, to the question... I have a small IT consulting business and I am finding many of my clients couldn't afford Microsoft solutions and thus, going without... So a revelation hit me that I could offer Linux solutions, its just that I'm not a Linux guru... So after much research and installations of nearly every latest Linux distro, I decided on ClearOS as a good option for my clients that just require a good File/Print server, firewall and VPN solution... Everything was going fine until I got to the point where I was trying to get it to do backups to a USB drive... ClearOS does not come with the ability to do such, so from further research I found that I could install Webmin to handle that task and that it would not break ClearOS... Great, its just that its not working... It says its working, but its not...

So here's what I got, ClearOS 5.1 with Webmin 1.5

Here's what I have done to try to make it work after a good installation...

Under "Hardware" and "Partitions on Local Disks", it shows the USB drive as Device B... So I create a partion called "/dev/sdb1" Great, I'm thinking...

So I go to "System" and under "Filesystem backup", I select the FlexShare directory that I want backed up and then I select "/dev/sdb1" as the backup to device...

Next I hit the "Save and Backup Now" button to test it out... all says it goes good... But when I check the device, there's nothing saved to it...

So I create another "Filesystem backup", I select the FlexShare directory that I want backed up and this time I select a local directory for the backup to go to... I hit the "Save and Backup Now" button to test it out... all says it goes good... But once again when I check the directory, there's nothing saved to it...

Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong?

Don't much about Webmin or ClearOS but I wonder whether you need to mount /dev/sdb1 to a mount point first, like: mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup; Needless to say you need a filesystem on the partition first...

I use rsync for this job, something like rsync -avH /source /backup will work great, and can be automated in a cron job...

I tried, but I get this error when I attempt to backup...

tar: /mnt/backup: Cannot open: Is a directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

If you give the exact commands that gave the error as well as the output of fdisk -l and mount (both as root or using sudo mount or sudo fdisk -l ) then it'll be easier for us to help you out. Clearly you're using tar, which is fine...