[Techtalk] What is you backup strategy for home use?

[Angelina Carlton]

Hello

After some close calls and sadly the loss of 500 pictures or so, Ive
decided to get a lot more proactive about backing up my data.

This question is based on the following criteria:

1. I have several computers to backup, 3 main ones, 2 running debian
unstable and 1 running debian woody. I have a windows machine I would
like to re-deploy and do a fresh install of woody and use this as the target for 
all the other backups. 

2. the only thing I back up is data, no system files.

3. all the target data is in /home on each client. /home is the only
folder that will be backed up.

4. At present, my biggest ~/ directory is 3.1 GB I cannot guess
what size it will be in 1 year or 2, but I expect less than 5GB
lets say. 

So basically, every other machine backs up to my new server and i can
periodically burn cdroms from the main backup server. 

good approach? I don't want to backup from one partition on host1 to
another partition on host1 as a disc crash could wipe out all my data.

my feeling is that the likelyhood of both the server and the client
having their disc crash on the same day is a reasonable risk to take.
I do keep cdroms at my parents house and will continue to do so in the
event of theft, flood, or fire. 

What I don't know is the best software for this. I know it is a
difficult solution as there are so many ways to do it. 

One package that looks good is rdiff-backup[1] but it doesn't appear
to do anything with the files on the other end, as in archive them and
then rotate the tarballs etc..

I have heard of people even using cvs for backups, is this worth
looking into? I am hoping for some input of what other people use to backup and
if they do plain old "dump and restores" or incremental backups with
nightly, weekly and monthly..or local backups on each machine...

If there is a killer package to do all of this for me I'd love to hear 
about it, and if its available for Debian even better! 


TIA for any suggestions.


[1]http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/index.html
-- 
Angelina Carlton