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What makes CrashPlan so compelling to me is that my mom can use it to backup her Windows box to my Linux PC, from across the state -- automatically simply by having the PC on and scheduled to do the backup. It is very simply to use and honestly, it has never failed me.

I also like that CrashPlan offers both incremental and differential backups, so I am not filling up space that is really unneeded. At the end of the day, this is as secure as Amanda but as simple to use as sbackup. And it has offsite network storage with self-discovery of other CrashPlan awareness on your LAN. This means other PCs or Macs with CrashPlan installed can be set to "see" one another to make networked backups a simple thing.

The biggest two downsides unfortunately, include the sbackup USB hard drive problem meaning PCs used to backup to ought to be left on. And of course, it is not open source.

Partitioning or imaging solutions are no good

Many of you will argue this point home, but in my honest opinion, backing up to another partition or using Ghost-like options to clone a partition are just asking for problems. Not so much because of the software, rather because of the fact that when using Linux, backing up your home directory alone is a bigger help than putting blind faith into some partition clone option in homes that your data is preserved when it comes time to restore. If you need something this hardcore, I would do the following:

1) Use an enterprise solution like Amanda.

2) Go with Remastersys to backup your "system" installation. Set it to ignore your home directory. Then make scheduled backups of your home directory separately.

The only thing to keep in mind with something like remastersys is that it is for Ubuntu and like-minded distributions only. So I do not believe it will work with OpenSuSE or Fedora. In these cases, going with Rsync or Amanda is going to be a stronger bet for these users.

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