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And of course you have to exclude /media, too

Oh yeah, good point.
Thanks!

As an addition to this thread, I can also advice the use of the alternate software: backintime
As also an alternate method, why not using software RAID in mirror?

JRD wrote:why not using software RAID in mirror?

Because RAID is not a backup If I accidentally delete some files they are gone on my RAID but not on a backup.

you're right. I just don't know the reason of the poster whereas he searched for a backup solution or a redondance solution.

I looked at backintime, but since Slackware already comes with rsync, and since rsync is capable of doing what I need, the only obstacle would be my own ignorance. Therefore, time to learn rsync.

I actually have two more questions. Sorry, but I really want to understand what I'm doing rather than just copying and pasting code.

1) I notice that in the rsync line you offered.... ..../media/disk doesn't end with a trailing backslash, like this: /media/disk/ and I am wondering why not.

2) As you know, /home/dennis is on a separate partition. So when I mirror that sda partition to the corresponding sdb partition , do I use the same type of rsync line? In other words, would I run: ....OR: ...OR none of the above?? Thanks for your patience in answering these questions.

It doesn't matter, unless for some very poorly written programs scripts maybe. But then they usually do something like this "/some/path" + "file" = "/some/pathfile" instead of doing "/some/path" + "/file".
In the first form /some/path may be a directory or a file.
In the second form /some/path/ must be a file.
Try this (best run it in a separate, empty directory): So for directories it doesn't matter whether there's a leading slash or not but for files it does and for symlinks/soft links too.
I can even build crazy paths like that last ls command and can use as many slashes as I want.

Shador: I have to correct you here For rsync the trailing slashes are very important on the source dir.

rsync -av /home /backup creates a folder home inside of /backup.
rsync -av /home/ /backup syncs the content of home directly to /backup.

These 2 commands do the same:
rsync -av /src/foo /dest
rsync -av /src/foo/ /dest/foo

EDIT:
rsync -avx /home/dennis /media/disk-1/dennis would result in a dir structure /media/disk-1/dennis/dennis
rsync -avx /home/dennis/ /media/disk-1/dennis/ is OK. The trailing slash on the destination directory is not needed but does not harm.

Ok thenktor. I think I've got it.

There's still one thing hurting my brain. In the command: the source actually IS a leading slash (being the character representation of the root directory). So are we to just understand that a trailing slash is implied?

I hope I don't seem obtuse, I just can't seem to get rsync syntax clear in my mind and I would rather not bork my back-up HDD because I was too timid to ask specific questions..

Thanks again.

It's a leading and a trailing slash