Alex, Unison was not really designed as a backup tool. It is primarily a tool for maintaining mirrored data. In that (latter) capacity, it's great. I used it for a few months as a backup tool, but it has problems. It was a while ago now, so I'm sorry but I can't be more specific as to why - my bad memory! See my post above about BackupPC. It's fantastic. Cheers John »

BackupPC is a fantastic backup tool, which gets precious little air time. http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ Key points: * It's GPL * It's rsync-based, and written in perl. * It will back up Windows, Linux or OSX machines * It 'pools' identical files, saving massive amounts of space on the backup host * It compresses all backed up files. * It's extremely flexible. Basically anything can be (re)configured. * It facilitates backing up fixed (desktop) and often disconnected (laptop) machines. * It has a great web-based interface, allowing you to drill down to individual files in the backup as well as see the complete change history of a backed up file. On top of that, restores only take a few clicks and the file(s) are restored automatically back onto the target. I've been using backuppc in a production environment for 3+ years and it 'just works' and never fails. I currently have over 920GB of files backed up across more than 10 machines. Due to pooling and compression, the backup pool is only about 160GB!!! Simply fantastic and highly recommended. It's saved my IT life on numerous occasions. I've reviewed most backup systems and nothing else comes close to BackupPC. Cheers John »

At the risk of sounding as though I'm on another planet... I am one of those persons who does not see the complexity and 'stack depth' of the 'web 2' and 'web 3' era. I'm very much a fan of the 'KISS' or 'Keep It Simple, Stupid' approach. Why have a client-side UI embedded in a browser? Why code in a way that, by nature of the legacy infrastructure, must be splattered almost randomly across the (very different) dynamic push-pull, stateful (web 2) and pull-only, stateless (web 1) paradigms? Why don't we draw a line in the sand between stateless one-way information internet data repositories and dynamic, 2 way stateful internet software systems. The internet infrastructure is getting sloppy under it's own momentum. As people who know something about data, software and networking, let's not contributing to the growing mess of hodge-podge systems and (non)interoperability. »

Thanks for the heads up on rsnapshot. I hadn't encountered this backup system before. I would also like to recommend BackupPC ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ). I've found it to be absolutely fantastic. It uses rsync also, but also works over ssh to backup remote machines. Furthermore, it pools all backed up files to eliminate duplicates (across all backups) and compresses them. I currently use BackupPC at my workplace to backup a large number of remote machines. The total size of files backed up is almost 1 Terabyte, but due to pooling, duplicate removal, and compression the actual size of the backup pool is only 100GB. It 'just works' and keeps on working. It is far and away the best backup system I've ever used. Cheers John »