Your instructions for copying the file should work fine, except the flags for mount come before the directory (and -w is default, so you don't need to use it anyway). You can just do this from /home:

The dot, by the way, is an abbreviation for whatever your current directory is, so it's copying from /mnt/cdrom to the current directory.

As far as extracting it, zcat is just going to un-gzip it, but it's tarred as well. The right command would be "tar zxvf rsync-2.6.5.tar.gz" (z mean un-gzip, x means extract from a tar archive, v means be verbose and list files as they are extracted, and f means the filename follows next). This should create a directory in the current directory named "rsync-2.6.5" with the extracted contents inside.

--EDIT--
Actually, -w means mount read/write, and you can't do that with a CD in the first place.

yep, doing that will copy the .tar.gz file to /home/sware, then all you have to is
this should extract rsync-2.6.5.tar.gz to /home/sware

a good resource for looking what different commands do is the man pages

these are different discriptions of the different tools availiable on your system. it's accessed by typing "man toolname"

too learn more about the man pages try typing "man man"

i'm hooking up an ext. hdrive up for another backup source.

once plugged in to the usb port what command do i use to mount it? or rather how do i reference the random external hard drive i have?

thanks for the help in advance!

you may also want to add the external hd to your fstab

mount -t filesystemtype /dev/sdXY /mnt/mountpoint

is the filesystem type...like fat32 or ntfs ...is that what its looking for?

and can the mount point be /mnt/anything/ ?

is it fairly simple to set a backup to an external hard drive with cron?

yup, I think filesystems available for your system are listed in /proc/filesystems

and a mount point can be any folder on your hard drive, not just a folder in the /mnt directory

You do have to create the directory first, though, before you can mount anything on to it.

OK here¡¦s the piece,\

In an attempt to hook up an 80 gig ext. hard-drive:

I loaded rsync...then created the folder to mount the file system /mnt/usb80gig/.

From there I typed:

mount -t usbfs /dev/sdXY
/mnt/usb80gig

And I don't think it did anything and I don't really know how to browse the 80 external hard-drive.

Should I have done this (below)??:

mount -t fat32 /dev/sdXY
/mnt/usb80gig

Any help would be huge.

Thanks again everyone.

got it!


let me just confirm that i'm on the right track...

the /mnt/directory/ ...is the actual drive to save to...correct?

yep. Saving to the /mnt/directory is like saving to the drive letter in Windows

i used this to mount the drive and did a backup to and it saved to the folder...but for some reason it must not have mounted because i shortly thereafter started getting all the weird errors of an out of space hard-drive.

what do you suspect my error might be...i know it's hard to tell not looking at my machine...but i'm hoping you have a suspicion.

any ideas?

Did mount give you any error messages? and could you post the exact error messages your getting. Without them it's very difficult/impossible to diagnose any problems.

thanks DL