When you’re doing a backup without access to fancy tools such as rsync or BRU you can always rely on standard CLI utilities to be installed on Linux. For a simple backup, use a LiveCD and boot to their desktop.

Once the desktop is up, open up a console terminal. Switch to the parent directory of the directory you’d like to backup.

Now that you’ve changed over to the directory under the one you wish to backup, the command “tar cvzpf /some/path/some/file.tgz directory” where /some/path/some/file.tgz is the path and the filename you’d like to compress the directory to. “.tgz” is the common extension for a gzip compressed tarball file.

What this does is create a tarball with the options (c)reate, (v)erbose output, g(z)ip, (p)reserve, (f)ile output. To uncompress the tarballed backup directory, switch over to wherever you’d like it to decompress to and type “tar xvzpf /some/path/some/file.tgz”, the x standing for e(x)tract.

Of course, if you’re doing anything critical take some time to familiarize yourself with the TAR man page and play with the utility a bit. With a bit of fiddling, TAR makes for an excellent built in Unix backup tool!