cp

The cost of hard drives continues to drop and so they make great backup options. The key to backing up to a hard drive is to have two hard drives. It is not too productive to backup on the same hard drive as your data because if that drive fails you will lose it all. One way to use a second hard drive is to create a separate partition on the second drive for backups called /bk for instance. Then either drag and-drop data to the second drive or use the cp command. Here is an example with two hard drives where the second hard drive is one partition /bk. This is a quick command:

cp -R /home /bk

Notice that the copy command, cp is used with the recursive option -R which copies over all the subdirectories as well.