I have linux developer. I never backed up any files from my developer to external hard drive. can anyone assist with it? thanks

Jason

Back up everything? Is it really necessary?

If you can get the system down to a very quiet state, then you could just copy everything and pray that there won't be many changed files during your backup session. Something as simple as cp, rsync, tar or dump would do.

Another option is to boot from a Linux CD, mount your / on the hard drive and the external drive, again use cp, rsync, tar, dump, whatever you like to copy stuff over. This will make sure that all the files are in sync.

To get really good online backups even from a busy system, you have to use snapshots. And for snapshots you have to use LVM.

Hi Nodsu,
Thank you for your feedback. it works. Thansk again