[CS-FSLUG] Backing up in Linux

[Nathan T.]

Hi CS-FLUG members,

One of the luxuries I've had in Windows is  backup software by Acronis, 
I've had a few opportunities on my (former) work machine as well as my 
home machine to test the software out both on backing up and restoring 
afterwards and it's always worked perfectly. I got bit in the backside 
when I tried to do the same in Ubuntu though, my FireFox and Thunderbird 
settings, bookmarks and e-mails were gone and I had to copy over the 
profiles from my Mac in order to get them back in Ubuntu.

My mistake was relying on the backup software that was available in 
7.10, there was something I think I had run into in Synaptic that seemed 
like a backup daemon specifically made for Ubuntu, when I upgraded to 
8.04 by doing a clean install I couldn't find the software again, and 
when I tried to manually restore the back-ups the archives were 
incomplete incremental back-ups and no matter how I restored them I 
never had all the files to rebuild what I had before. I'd like to avoid 
having that happen again, but I'd also like to avoid having to get into 
overly complicated processes for backing up.

Is there a simple program that can schedule incremental back-ups, and 
restore them afterwards. It's important that the software makes sure to 
adjust the permissions, since the backed up information may be migrated 
forward to a new version of whatever distribution I happen to use, it 
has to perform well whether I'm using KDE or Gnome, and I would like it 
to allow me to manually start a back-up if I feel there is important 
information that needs to be backed up asap.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

BTW. Ubuntu 8.04 shows significant improvement over 7.10, I'd recommend 
it to anyone who's not already settled on another distribution or 
operating system. So far Ubuntu 8.04 looks solid, mature, and stable. I 
haven't tested the hardware support with all of my peripherals though 
(and probably won't since I primarily use Windows Vista).

Thanks.

Nathan T.