copying a home directory onto a removable drive and back

[Adam Funk]

On 2010-07-28, Adam Funk wrote:

> I want to copy my home directory onto a USB drive (formatted to ext3),
> shuffle the partitions around on the computer, and copy my home
> directory back (onto a new, blank partition).  I can think of four
> ways to do it, although I'm not familiar with using the fourth:
>
> cp -r
> rsync
> tar
> cpio
>
> Recommendations?

I forgot to mention that one of my concerns is getting the file
permissions and ownerships and any hard links right when I copy
everything back.  (I doubt that I have any hard links, but you never
know.)