As far as your solution goes, which does have some appeal, I wonder: how much is the scheme used in practice, and if it isn't widely used - is there a reason it isn't?
probably unknown mostly. I trying to get the word out a bit :-)
We back up about 15 or so companies worth of stuff to remote or firewire drives plus a number of backups of our own. We have very little trouble with rdiff-backup - most of the problems come from firewire drives misbehaving (fsck regularly helps). remote is rock solid.
on the mailing list for rdiff-backup there are people backing up terabytes worth of data from heaps of machines. on the wiki there a few scripts to help with doing multiple backups.
I haven't found a problem with it yet. Only negative reaction after talking to anyone about it was from one Tony Green and he never explained himself :-)
*shrugs*
dave -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
