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.

I have about 120gb of data that keep backed up
which is mainly just email, documents, code and web sites I developed.
What I liked about this software is it can backup hourly, daily, weekly,
etc, which I was doing the daily on almost everything but my code
folders, hourly.

Back in time is a front end for rsync I think someone said recently. With
rsync you can automate the daily backups instead of doing them manually.
Basically it just makes a mirror of your specified directories on the backup
directory. There's a lot of options to play with also.

This backup method doesnt work if your computer catches fire or is stolen.
I do backups to an external USB hard drive
and put it somewhere else.

TB hard drives are cheap compared to the time we put into our computers.

If I only had 12G to backup, I wuoldnt worry about automating it, one graphic
copy command and its done.

Yes, you do need more than one backup copy, and a miminum of one of them to not
be connected to the pc, if you value your data.

Why not write a script to do it all. If a backup app cant do your backup, what
earthly use is it.

Back in time basically is the equivalent of a script using rsync and diff to
initiate sync (I just checked the website).

Wade, the only thing that I can think of is a) maybe Cron crashed or b) for
some reason it was not being run as a user that had read permissions on that
directory.

One other thing to consider, it will not copy stuff over if it does not find
differences between the two directories.

Sorry for not being as big and important as you.

Well, its working now. I had a little trouble with my ext hd not waking
for the backup but fixed that. Now though my computer doesn't go to
sleep but I can deal with that. There was a option for hidden files that
I didn't see. Its doing incremental backups hourly but its just odd how
its doing it. Im watching it closely. New software is always closely
watch

I don't much worry about backing up what I do in the normal sense of the
word. What I do is copy the home folder and save it with a date. For me
this is a drag and drop thing. Isn't RAID for setting up a backup of
everything? I realize that what I do may cause problems when I need to
find an old file but thats the way I do it anyhow.

That is a bit difficult to do with 80+ gb of data.

So far this little software I think is doing great. Im looking
constantly to be sure its backing things up. And it is.