[Novalug] best way to back up a home partition.

[Bonnie Dalzell]

i have two harddrives - each with an Ubuntu installation on them. they go 
into externally accessable drive drawers. one sits on the shelf as a 
backup.

last night while trying to get alien to work (the rpm to deb program - 
not a game) I managed to ugrade ubuntu on the ubuntu drive in the machine. 
this resulted in loosing the ability to start up x - when you try startx 
you get the error:

xinit connection refused (error111)

so before doing anything else I put the backup harddrive in an booted from 
it and I used gnome-commander to copy the home directory from the messuped 
installation harddrive to a subdirectory on another harddrive.

then it occured to me: what is the best way to do such a backup copy?

also of course any suggestions on getting x working again would be 
apprectiated.

trying to get alien to install resulted in a report that the dependencies 
were broken - apt-get was not able to get rpm which is needed for alien to 
work.

another problem I had - part of the reason for tryign to upgrade - was 
that I could not compile the tar.gz version of anything because the 
install routines wanted to call cc and apparently my system has gcc and 
is not set up to tell the installer routines that cc and gcc are the same.

I have a lot to learn.

right now I am booted off of the ubuntu installation on the backup 
harddrive which is either dapper or edgy. i have not figured out which.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                        Bonnie Dalzell, MA
mail:5100 Hydes Rd ---- Hydes MD USA 21082-----EMAIL:bdalzell at qis.net

freelance anatomist, vertebrate paleontologist, writer, illustrator, dog
breeder, computer nerd & iconoclast... Borzoi info at www.borzois.com.

Editor Net.Pet Online Animal Magazine  - http://www.netpetmagazine.com
HOME http://www.qis.net/~borzoi/          BUSINESS http://www.batw.com