[Trisquel-users] No GUI and Backup Home through Terminal

[ancientorderoflonghairs]

No GUI:

I've had Triquel almost a year and had problems for several months but I've  
procrastinated and worked around the problems by accessing my jpegs and  
gedits through applications.  But there's no GUI, no calling up the home  
folder, no icons on my desktop and no drag and drop functions.

I think it's time to reinstall.  But I want to backup my home folder files. I  
have an external USB harddrive that appears in a sidebar as TOSHIBA EXT. So  
at terminal I've got this far "$ cp /home/user/  "   right? what next? adding  
"TOSHIBA EXT" to the line won't do it. (without quotes)