Please Help: Need to Backup home folder to external drive via terminal

Hello all. I have apparently broken my installation, though I am uncertain how. I can boot into the terminal, but the desktop shell refuses to load under any circumstances. The best thing I can think of is to simply reinstall.

But before I reinstall, I need to backup my home folder to the external drive.

I found a program called rsync that seems easy enough, but I cannot figure out the location of my external usb drive.

Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Please?

FYI, I'm using Linux Mint 9

Moved to Other OS/Distro Talk.

Double post.

noob555 said:

I found a program called rsync that seems easy enough, but I cannot figure out the location of my external usb drive.

Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Please?

You are on the right tract.

sudo fdisk -l

I just inserted 4GB flash drive to test it and it is picked up as:

Disk /dev/sdi: 4026 MB, 4026531840 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 489 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0008c349

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdi1 * 1 490 3932128+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA) Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(488, 254, 63) logical=(489, 135, 30)

In my case it is /dev/sdi1 but for you it will be different.