rsync
In some respects I'm living in a brave new world of computing convenience these days. I have my external HDD sitting in the corner with the raspberry pi serving it's contents up to the tv, kindle and ipad. Photographs and music (which I never used to backup in any kind of coherent way), I now send to the HDD over scp by SSH or (latterly) ftp from the file manager. But I want more, dammit! I want the photos and music to be backed up automatically at regular intervals so all I have to do is plonk them in the right local directories and forget about them. I've been aware for a while that rsync might be the way to go about this. After reading about a bit, making sure rsysnc was present on the pi and laptop, etc: rsync -r --size-only /home/mitch/Music root@192.168.1.107:/media/Seagate\ Expansion\ Drive/Music And a similar experiment: rsync -r --size-only /home/mitch/images/photographs/copy_06_june_2014/ root@192.168.1.107:/media/Seagate\ Expansion\ Drive/Other\ files...