Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
You want a recursive copy, which you can do with the options -r or -a.
See "man cp".
Thanks Richard, Bart, Dmitriy for all the suggestions. They really
helped a lot. I now have a first version of a script working that is
backing up the files that I consider important. Now I can tinker with
it and make it better, and experiment with things like rsync.
The problem that I was having is that I did not know if various
described features did what I wanted. I had read "man cp" several
times, but did not know the full implications of all the described
options. For instance, I just want to save my email so I can restore it
on another machine if this one fails. Do I need an exact copy using the
-a option for cp? I don't know, but I suspect not. Anyway, I have a
starting point now and I can try various experiments to figure out these
details. Thanks again.
--
Randal Leavitt - another Ubuntu user
http://positiveenergy.blogspot.com/
http://www.simpy.com/user/randalleavitt/links
http://tinyurl.com/hgvmg