For better or worse this is how I do a backup...

I had an old 80GB hard drive laying around so I installed it as a second HD.
I go into and cd to /home. In /home is a directory /home/mike. Then
I click . In the second pane I mount the 80GB HD, create
a folder named the current date, today being "2011-07-31". Then copy the
directory "mike" and all its subdirs into "2011-07-31". This takes about 3
to 4 minutes to copy/backup over 12GB of files. Now it will take two HD
failures to wipe out my data. I usually backup about everyday. When the 80GB
gets too full to hold another backup I delete the next to oldest backup,
leaving the oldest backup just in case. I usually have around 5 12GB backups
on the 80GB at any one time.

I'm in the process of installing a Kingwin hard drive rack and using their
trays to hold two or more HDs. One will be used to keep the current data
backuped. The other will be backuped once a month or so and stored off
sight, just in case.

To some this may be overkill, to me, I have a lot of info that I have
invested a lot of time collecting and/or coding and I don't want to loose
it, "it" not being nearly 12GB but once you are going that way the rest is
not that much of a load.