Thanks for some help that will probably save me a lot of headaches in the future. I want to mirror a drive using tar and am not sure exactly how to do it. I can get it to transfer all the files but I'm worried about ownership, rights etc. I want the 2nd drive to be able to replace the 1st drive if the 1st drive fails. Any advice appreciated.

I bought a used server that supposedly had raid mirror but it doesn't. Does have identical 2nd drive though. I'm also open to a better solution than tar. Have been wondering if wget might be used? Using webmin on redhat 6.2

Thanks in advance,
Willy Peake

Try rsync instead.

rsync -avzx --delete <partition> <destination>