All right so far. ??? I thought you were running Linux! If you intended to plug the hard drive into anything directly, Windows wouldn't understand XFS. But that should be a non-issue for network storage. I'm not sure why it says this. True for Windows, but XFS isn't completely alien -- we use it here at work for our Linux file server. Linux can, if it's configured to do so. I don't have a Buffalo Linkstation Live LS-CHL so I can't tell you how you'd be able to connect to it, but once you do, you open a DOS prompt, change to the drive you attached your NAS as, and run the command. You'll need to put udpcast on the same drive or in your PATH. You can download a windows version of udp-receiver from UDP Cast Well, you need to install udpcast first of course. And you can run it under any user with sufficient access privileges to get at all the files in question. Yes. All the files on which drive? Linux doesn't have a c: or d: like Windows, all your partitions are accessed through the same file tree. Some folders chosen by /etc/fstab become partitions -- files inside them reside on that partition.

You can't just do a blind copy of everything while the server's running. There's things that shouldn't be copied while in use, and lots of things it wouldn't make sense to bother copying anyway.

If you really want to do a true, blind copy of the server that you could copy back into a new drive and boot without it knowing the difference, you shouldn't do so while the server's operating, you should boot from a livecd and do so with minimal effect on the system itself. But if you don't actually know how to use Linux yet, your options are very limited.

So, what's your server actually doing? If you don't know, could you find out?
Windows creates the file, Windows decides the name. Yes. You can name it anything you want.

---------- Post updated at 03:21 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:17 PM ----------

It may be simpler, and faster to plug the drive into the server direct, mount it, and create the tarball on it that way. Assuming your Linux server can understand XFS.