Recommendations on backup

[Douglas Bates <bates@stat.wisc.edu>]

I am running a Debian 2.2 machine at home for a project I am working
on.  At the office I have the luxury of having file system backups
taken for me by our systems group.  At home I will need to do this
myself.

At present the home machine has only a high quality (HP) CD-RW drive
(SCSI interface) for removable media.  I could add a DAT drive or
something like that but would prefer to avoid the expense if possible.

I have lots of disk space available as a staging area, if needed.  My
plans are: 
  - schedule the backups with crontab, writing to a special disk
    partition.
  - check the size of the compressed archive(s) and, if it looks as if
    they will fit, write them to a CD-RW.  If they won't fit, send
    myself mail and punt.

Comments?  Suggestions?  Recommendations of backup packages?