I ended up using DAR for a backup I needed to do to a 500G USB drive.  It took roughly 28 hours (USB isn't a very good filesystem interface, especially for 400G of backup data...), but it worked fairly well.

Below is the command I ran (from /, and after dropping the system into single user mode, very important when backing up the root filesystem...)

dar -y9 -s 4G -D -R / -c "/media/disk/Backup-$(date -I)" -Z "*.gz" -Z "*.bz2" -Z "*.zip" -Z "*.png" -Z "*.jpg" -Z "*.jpeg" -P tmp -P mnt -P dev -P proc -P "media/*" -P var/run -P var/lock -P "lib/modules/2.6.*/volatile" </dev/null 2>&1 1>"/tmp/darbackup$(date -I).out" &


Alex Dean wrote:
> Matrix Mole wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 10:35 AM, Alex Dean <alex@crackpot.org> wrote:
>>> I need backup software for a home network.  Mix of Linux and OSX
>>> machines.
>>>  Will be using an external HDD for backup media.  The backup server
>>> will run
>>> on one of the OSX machines, since it's the only non-laptop I have.  I'm
>>> mainly looking for something that's easy to configure and has minimal
>>> resource consumption.
>>
>> I like the rsync option for backup purposes. I'm not sure if it'll
>> work for your setup. I've been using it to keep my web servers safe
>> and stored on my local network from their remote machine locations.
>> Plus, with rsync being command line, it should be very easy to write
>> shell scripts for it.
> 
> I'm sure it would work.  But honestly, I don't want to write all those
> scripts.  I think it's probably already been done by others who have
> considered more cases than I'm likely to think of.
> 
> DIY is cool when you're interested in the project, but I'm not that
> interested in this.  I just want something I can fire up and get my
> machines backed up with minimal effort.
> 
> thanks,
> alex
> 
> 
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