backuppc - the ultimate automated backup solution?

That thing rocks!

Setup was moderately unsmooth as I needed to experiment a bit with the different options.  I have a  mix of Linux and Windows (different versions), laptops and desktops, DHCP on all of them.  I tried a bit of everything. The localhost (backup server) is backed up by the tar method (with help from visudo).  Other Linux hosts (or dual-boot linux+windows hosts) are backed up by rsync over ssh (with help from rsa certificates for authentication and a restriction to allow this only from the backup server's hostname).  Windows hosts are backed up by SMB and rather than giving administrator access I decided to create a local user on each of them and share only the parts of the disk that need back ups (like C:\Users) and give access to that user.  I'll have to rely on the Windows firewall to restrict this usage only from the backup server host name.

After a week or so, I was confident that this would work but I re-installed the whole thing to take advantage of LVM partitioning on my new 2TB SATA drive installed especially for this purpose in the backup server.  In my initial install I had partitioned that thing in the traditional way and I had a number of partitions on that drive for no good reason.

Now another week is almost over and I can say everything works as expected.  Backups are being taken (not necessarily daily, both clients and server need to be up and connected on the network at the same time of course, and backup is only attempted hourly).  I only got one email sent over that period (the day I re-installed the thing, before I was able to configure one of the SMB hosts).

I start the server manually when I feel we all need some good backup (if nobody else powered it before I do) and I added a crontab entry to shut it down at 04:00 AM (when backups are expected to be finished).  We'll see how this works but so far, so good and much better than my previous solutions.  I went back yesterday to sourceforge to give a nice rating to this project.  I will keep an eye on the 4.x version as it progresses.