Gary Dale grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
Bacula. It backs up whatever you want it to however you want it to.
It's not as simple as some, but if you want a comprehensive backup
solution, it's hard to beat. Bacula has some pretty good job definitions
set up by default to do, for example, a weekly full backup and nightly
incrementals with backups going back as far as you want.
I use it to back up home directories and some shared Windows files kept
on another machine. Bacula works well in mixed environments.
Sounds promising! I'll look into it.
I've been a *NIX junkie since before Linux existed; config files don't
scare me easily. :-)
On the other hand, to do a full system backup to a second drive, try dd.
Something as simple as a cron job to do
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
will do the copy quickly and effectively.
I'm sure it does, but I'm not looking to just copy over the entire
system to another drive every day.
However, you may also want to consider software raid (mdadm). Use your
two drives in a RAID 1 array so that a single drive failure won't shut
you down. Use this in conjunction with bacula to avoid the "why did I rm
that" problem and you should be unstoppable.
Agreed. Unfortunately I've been out of work for a while now, so
purchasing *two* drives is kinda out of the question. At least for now.
So if I do scratch up enough money to get another 1T hard drive, I'll
use it for backups. But soon as I'm working again, a RAID mirror is
definitely something I'd want to set up, for just the reason you mention.