I downloaded the eval version ... but it made me hunt up a WIN98 machine with a CD burner, so I could run the ".exe" download ... just to burn the ISO for me! All that, so that I could try out a linux based program to back up a linux only machine (not a dual boot system). Seems like the long "run-around-end" to get to the goal.
After all that, it wanted to make a compressed copy of my hda1 partition on hda6. Which copy, I would then have to burn to CD, manually. This is getting a little silly.
Thanks for all the help and suggestions ... but I don't have time to play like this. I'm opting for the old machine with big HD to do a network backup of all the other disks. I guess the question will then be, how long do I have to sleep at night so the backups can complete.
I think you're right - if you have the hard disk space, HD backups are a lot easier, and you can set them as cron jobs. The only disadvantage is if the backup box is in the same building as the other computers, then a physical disaster (fire, flood, massive power spike, al-Qaeda attack, Avril Lavigne video) can wipe it out along with the rest. Otherwise it's pretty reliable. If you've got HD space in spades, you can even back up the backups. I do this with my backup script that grabs the contents of "My Documents" on the Windows machines. There's always the possibility that a user has left the computer in a state where it's unreachable on the network, so the backup file gets overwritten by a load of nothing (I supose you could get round that by checking the file size).
Sir Robin
-- "The raisins may be the best part of a cake, but that doesn't mean that a bag of raisins is better than a cake." - Wittgenstein
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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