Thanks Andy, I am getting close but as yet, no cigar. The data I want on the Hitachi external drive is on my desktop pc which has console access The notebook can mount the Hitachi drive, so that is where it is located

From the notebook I ran this:

rsync -avp /home /media/Hitachi/DesktopSuseBackup and the home dir of my Notebook is now backed up to the Hitachi So the next plan was: if I could figure out how to mount the Hitachi on the desktop, I would run the identical command from that console, and get the desired result. In my Notebook the external Hitachi drive is shown as /media/Hitachi and running df from the console in the notebook shows it is mounted as /dev/sdc1, so I plugged the Hitachi into the Desktop machine and ran dmesg which showed it as sdb1, then mkdir /mnt/Hitachi and mounted the drive, I used mc to make a new directory in the Hitachi --- Bak_Suse_Desktop ran the command above as rsync -avp /home /mnt/Hitachi/Bak_Suse_Desktop and went shopping. On my return with the groceries, everything I needed (and more) was in the external drive. Now I can reload the system onto my desktop Perhaps it might be better if I isolate my data from my system and just keep snapshots of my system, that are not clogged with data. There are definitely some easier ways to avoid the dramas of this last week, and quicker ways to recover, I have much to learn. And I am very grateful for the assistance I receive on this list. On Sat, 2012-08-11 at 16:09 +0100, Andy Dean wrote:

I would use rsync over ssh and copy / home

Something like this should work

Rsync -avpe ssh /home user@ipnotebook:/home/user/backup

Or just rsync to a USB disk

Rsync -avp /home /media/backup disk

Andy

On Aug 11, 2012 3:59 PM, "Andrew Greig" <pushin.linux@gmail.com> wrote: Hi, I had some trouble with my Notebook and desktop computers last week when Entangle stuffed the display files on both computers. I successfully rebuilt the Notebook because I had a separate /home partition. Unfortunately the desktop PC (Suse 12.1 64 bit) was a single partition, and it will not be quite so easy. How do I get the files I want from the desktop onto a dive attached to my notebook? Ctrl+Alt+F2 gives me a console in the desktop. The Notebook is running Gnome. Once I have my data tucked away, I get adventurous.

Many thanks

Andrew Greig

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Allan Duncan wrote:

Why not boot using a live CD/DVD (or USB image thereof)? I would normally use Knoppix at level 3 for this task as it gets the boot over quickly, and I use the tools from the CLI anyway.

If that is for hysterical raisins, allow me to recommend Debian's official live images. -- in this case, the "rescue" flavour. [0] At present only Debian 6 versions are available pre-built; sometimes there are testing/unstable weekly builds. The infrastructure to build your own custom images is included in Debian, and is reasonably turnkey as at testing. [1] If you are REALLY in a hurry, replace "live-config" with "single" in the boot options, which speeds it up drastically when booting old hardware. Many other options are documented in the live-boot and live-config manpages (see their respective packages). [0] http://www.debian.org/CD/live/ [1] live-build, live-boot and live-config The latter two are vastly improved forks of Ubuntu's casper. The former I annoyed me enough that I threw it away: http://www.cyber.com.au/~twb/.bin/twb-bootstrap