After having my fair share of backup dilemmas and stress Tim Bray's post at least gives hope that I am not alone. It is strange that there really are not that many decent backup products considering how simple the task really is.
The most effective backup system I have used is the one I wrote myself for Linux servers. It is simple, flexible, non-proprietary and most importantly it seems to work without hassle. It comprises of a bash script and some configuration files.
The bash script compresses gzipped tar archives onto a removable hard drive. In most cases I use two removeable drives for redundancy. Typically all user data is stored in the /home directory with a few special directories: media (music/movies), temp and data shared amoungst the users. The /home/data directory holds most of the office data and as such the backup script breaks archiving of this data into smaller pieces in order to facilitate easier restoration.
The backup script stores multiple backups on disk to ensure that a corrupted backup does not lead to significant loss of data. The backup usually runs every night with the removable disks swapped during the day. On completion (or failure) of a backup an automated email is sent out to interested parties.
