I have a question maybe someone can nudge me in the right direction.

tar cvzpfP /media/sda1/spb/20031105.tar.gz /home

The above TAR command works fine however when you try to look in the zipped tar, it is very slow........ok so it well over 100 megs.

I read an article about rsync, very clever stuff.

When I try to use rsync on my Kmail folders the Mail folders are copied, but their contents NOT!

My line to try out rsync is this:
rsync -vrlpR /home/spb/Mail _/media/sda1/Mail

Any ideas?

Try this:

Note the trailing slash on the source directory. Without it, rsync syncs the directory, but not the contents.

Does not work though!

It starts out OK and then creates the directories correctly but the contents no. One of the error lines is under:-

mkstemp home/spb/Mail/t2/cur/.1063997552.2506.fdGY:2,S.nUPHOR failed: Invalid argument

This works! rsync -vrlpR /home/spb/Mail/* /home/spb/test

As you can see to the same partition which is not what I wanted.

Here is the error when I try to run it directly to my Toshiba 2GB pcmcia hard-drive which is attached to sda1 (USB):-

rsync -vrlpR /home/spb/Mail/* /media/sda1/Mail

mkstemp home/spb/Mail/trash/cur/.1068028865.3426.0T90:2,S.mlqpEz failed: Invalid argument wrote 7574380 bytes read 2740 bytes 5051413.33 bytes/sec
total size is 7558608 speedup is 1.00
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(620)

I am using SuSE 8.2

Got it!
FULL backup of HOME
rsync -vrlpR /home/spb/* /home/spb/rsync_20031105

INCREMENTAL backup of HOME
rsync -uvrlpR --no-whole-file /home/spb/* /home/spb/rsync_20031105

Now I can use cp or a move command to dump the backup to my external drive and then remove the temporary folder in /home.

Exact backup at last. Takes about 2 minutes at the moment.