I did a search regarding backup here and in Google and was unable to find answers to my particular questions.

There is a backup utility in Mandriva Control Center.
Can a particular file be retrieved from the tar file built by this method?
I want to save the backup to a USB pen drive for portability.
How do I get this utility to save to a USB pen drive when all it list is /media/cdrom?

Or, where is there better backup software?

TIA
dlw

Hi, some backup software uses tar.bz2, others don't. simplebackup can use 7zip.

The magic is listing and extracting the files in the archive to the correct places.

What you need to look for is how to extract one file from a tar ball.

man tar. or try ark, an archive package for extracting files.

see how you go.

regards, Glenn

Hi, try kbackup...

kbackup is an application which lets you back up your data in a simple, user friendly way.

KBackup is a program that lets you back up any directories or files,
whereby it uses an easy to use directory tree to select the things to back up.

The program was designed to be very simple in its use
so that it can be used by non-computer experts.

The storage format is the well known TAR format, whereby the data
is still stored in compressed format (bzip2 or gzip).

Included Languages:
- User interface:
English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Slovak
- Handbook:
English, German, French

from here...

newmud-free-release

ftp://ftp.mandrivauser.de/rpm/GPL/20...86_64/release/

regards, Glenn

I do my backup easy.

[name@localhost ~]$ rsync -r -t -v --progress --delete /home/name/ /media/disk/

Then I have a copy of my computer.