Backups Backups Backups

These days my life has been all about backups. I've set up two backup systems recently, one at home and one at work. The one at work has just been a Veritas Netbackup system. Netbackup is great if: You're backing up to tape and need offsites. You're familiar using it. Unfortunately, unless you have a lot of time, it's very hard to learn all that netbackup does without going to training and getting their fancy training books which really should come with the damn program anyhow. The books they give you teach you how to use netbackup from start to finish. I won't say the training bit was a waste of time because it wasn't, but if the books I'd got during training had come with Netbackup, I probably wouldn't have gone. As for home, I'd previously been using boxbackup, a free system that works with windows, os x, and *nix/*bsd. I was happy with boxbackup for a while. It's not the most intuitive thing to set up, it's all cli, and you can't do a whole lot of client control (determine backups/do restores) from the server, which I always thought was weird. I'd recently tried to switch my os x clients from one backup method to another which didn't seem to work. I'd seen backuppc on the net and decided to try it and for those that like a slightly more graphical approach, and don't want to deal with the client software in the manner that boxbackup does, it's great. You can get many more stats out of backuppc than you can out of boxbackup. I'm not sure quite for how long backuppc will continue its momentum, but I'm pleased with it so far. Part of my problem with boxbackup, and with a lot of open source projects in general is that there's a great amount of momentum initially, and then the project basically fizzles. Hell I'm even guilty of that with my site.