But perhaps you can answer a question: is there a version of SuperDuper for Linux? Here's how it works: you plug in an external hard drive, and you boot SuperDuper. A wizard helps you click approximately five boxes. Then your external drive becomes a complete, bootable backup of your main drive, and it refreshes itself once per day (or more often, if you like).
(Things are a bit more painful if you have to unplug the drive occasionally -- you still have to unmount it by hand. Apple's latest Time Capsule product claims to solve that whole problem, but it doesn't do bootable backups. One-size-fits-all, maintenance-free, user-friendly backup is a really hard problem to solve, even in a universe of restricted hardware like the Mac. So I don't ask for miracles. I don't ask for a "stylized piece of crap" like Time Machine. Just SuperDuper will be fine.)
SuperDuper is very reliable, with one dedicated author who maintains the FAQ and answers tech support emails, typically within a day. The cost is $27.95, one-time only.
What's the equivalent for Linux? This is not a snarky question. I seriously want to know, because I have a Linux desktop system, and I wasted hours setting up the backups, and I waste another hour each time I restore them.
A Google search for Linux backup software brings me to pages advocating rsync, which is a wonderful tool which I use every day, but which is not Mom-friendly, or even particularly me-friendly. And it brings me to a 2006 article...
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2280165098.html
...that recommends "Simple Linux Backup", a nice open-source tool whose home page talks about bash, tar, gzip, gtk+, cron, the possible need to install Java 1.5 by hand, the need to unzip a tar.gz file, the many complicated options that I can use to organize my backups, and the complete lack of any warranty. "The Mac PPC version is brand new," it says, which leads me to wonder just how old this page is.
I want something better. I've been assured that Linux has the open-source solution for me. What is it?
It does not look too bad, maybe? But I must admit that I myself have neglected backups so far (source files and emails are on another server that has backups, though). My server uses something else, but I forgot the name (did not set it up myself).