hi ya as ya'll can tell there is no one real answer for "good backup" and everybody has their favorites methodology and assumptions and willingness to accept the restriction that any particular app has
-- a good backup app .. - you must decide on which backup media - floppy, cdrom, disks, tapes, locally or over the network or even over the ineternet - how much data you want to backup will dictate your backup media and the application you can use - you must decide if you need warm backup or "restore from bare metal backups" - you must decide .. what if you cannot recover the single most important file that had your secret passwd to the swiss bank acct - have multiple backups that does NOT have the same assumptions and restrictions so you can recover the important files from more than 1 way - you must KNOW exactly what it does NOT do - you must KNOW exactly all its restrictions and assumptions it uses to create your backup - what happens if your new environment, or broken environment no longer has the "full backup" to update to current or diff against - you must KNOW how to check for missing files or failed backups .. backups is guaranteed to fail because your disk is full or your network got disconnected or gazillion other problems - you must KNOW how long you are willing to wait and how exactly to reoover data from backup, assuming that you can - don't forget to encrypt your backups since it will contain your passwd and other confiential data - don't forget that the cracker will do "rm -rf / " and if you did automounting of your /mnt/BACKUPs... you're hosed - test .. test .. test ... and monitor daily or regularly, that it ran properly... - i like tar and find ... 1 line command for complete backups if needed - add the self checking and it become a giant script - free gazaillion backup apps.. including those already posted Linux-Backup.net/App c ya alvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]