I'm no coding guru. And I feel like having to write my own scripts to get stuff done in Unix/Linux is all too much like reinventing the wheel. Be that as it may, I hacked together these two short scripts to back up my /home files in Ubuntu 8.04 to an external USB drive. I put the scripts in /usr/local/bin and made them executable. I'm lazy enough that I used the Nautilus file manager to do this.