Networked Backup Solution?

[debio]

I'm wondering if anyone has tried to set up Bacula or another network backup suite to have the Sheevaplug host network backups. Also, does anyone have a networked backup suite they can recommend? I tried Bacula on Windows Vista, and bad things happened. It may have improved since then, though.

[ReverseEngineered]

I did find a few Linux backup suites, but unlike Windows, most things in Linux are done with basic tools and some scripts to automate the task.

In the case of backups, there are a few tools you can use.  Rsync will keep directory trees up to date, so if you just want to keep a mirror of your current system at all times, that's the easiest way.  If you want to have daily diffs (e.g. so you can go back before something got deleted), then rdiff-backup may be a better solution.  If you want to get fancy, you can wrap these in scripts to compress the diffs, name them, etc.

Finally, these programs don't run all the time in the background, they just do their job once when executed.  If you want them to run periodically, you'll want to use the cron.  Cron is basically a scheduler that periodically runs programs at given intervals.  Look into cron and the crontab to see how to set this up.

Alternatively, if you want something more powerful and that requires less scripting, look into AMANDA.  The company I work for is currently using rdiff-backup, but is planning to move to AMANDA because of the extra abilities it has (such as backing up different sources to different drives).

Just remember not to backup to the SD card -- it's only good for a few thousand writes.  You should really use an external HDD for anything that needs to be non-volatile, but will change often.

[debio]

I don't even have a SD card; my plan is to have it boot from the onboard flash and use an external hard drive for bulk storage.
The trick is that I maintain two linux boxes in a network of Windows boxes, and I need to be able to backup both types, which AMANDA doesn't do well. If I remember correctly, it can backup Windows boxes if you share the hard drive with SMB, which just doesn't seem like something I want to do.
I did, however, get Bacula working on Vista, and I'm looking into getting scheduled backups running. It's not as simple as just making a tar.lzma of my entire root filesystem, but it'll work for everything.