> Thanks for the replies so far :-) They were very informative.

> About BackupPC itself, I'm still evaluating whether or not to actually
> use it, but I'm starting to decide against it. Here are my reasons:

Not that I'm trying to sway your opinion either way, but since the
majority of your analysis, though detailed, is steeped in ignorance,
you're projecting the impression of somebody who has trouble changing
paradigms.  Not that there's really anything wrong with that, not
everybody thinks flexibly, and it's not always useful to do so.  I
wouldn't use BackupPC to backup my Oracle data, since stepping outside
Oracle's backup and recovery paradigm is generally a bad idea.

On the other hand, I can't imagine inventing my own overly-complicated
system of backing up Outlook Express files unless I really had nothing
better to do and there was some kind of biblical passage commanding me not
to purchase a cheap 500G drive whenever necessary and stop being a pain in
the ass.

While I appreciate your brief-albeit-misplaced-and-weirdly-patronizing
lecture on the Unix philosophy, I'd recommend starting with your Backup
and Recovery goals and priorities.  I'd suggest that manual space
management and diddling around with low level tools probably shouldn't be
at the top of your list, since for many people in the US, it only takes a
few hours of their time to equate to a terabyte of their time.  Your
mileage may vary.

I'll briefly outline my own priorities for a Backup system:
1) It must be reliable
2) Files to recover must be less than 24 hours out of date
3) Recovery must be simple
4) It must take very little time and effort to maintain

#1 implies a great deal, including sanity checking, notifications,
awareness of free space, and so on.

Having done a few bare-metal restores and considerably more registry and
spot file recovery, I can say without question, and as a professional
programmer, that I really do not want to have to worry about writing and
maintaining that all by myself.

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