The 03.05.13 at 02:04, Bob S. wrote:
All well and good and understood. Sooooo.... in my case, where I want to back up and protect my"home directories", and then choose what I want to keep, what would I do?
You might try mc (Midnight Comander). It is a console program similar to the old dos Norton Comander. One of the things it can do is create compressed tar archives (using tar, actually), and then look in to them and read arbitrary files, or copy to any destination. Not a GUI, but console, keyboard (even some mouse), and quite fast. Very nice for file browsing and copying. Another thing you can do is try "mkzftree". It creates a duplicate compressed tree ready to convert to an compressed iso image with "mkisofs -z ...", which you can pass to a CD for permanent backup. The kernel can read those CDs transparently, so you can use anything to copy/read/whatever files back. The only problem is when the image is larger than 700 Mb, there is no automatic split. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson