Jochen, Paul -- In thinking this over, I think that the best approach is to simply have a daily rsync --archive from my main hard drive to the backup drive. While I understand that more sophisticated backup systems are often useful in a large system, the system in question is a home computer with only 2 users. The file complement changes but slowly, and we never delete and rarely overwrite files, so there's no need to be able to, say, recover the 3 days ago version of a file. The backup system is mainly there for disaster recovery, with daily backups preferred just so that we don't lose many e-mail messages in the event of a catastrophic failure.
Do you concur that a simple rsync makes more sense in this context, or do you think that I would still benefit from using either the --link-dest option or rsnapshot? -PT
