Mary Gardiner wondered about easy backups for Linux, possibly something like Tima Machine. As far as I know, work has been progressing on a project along these lines, called TimeVault.
Unfortuntately Marys blog doesn't allow comments and I don't do LiveJournal, so I'll have to reply via the blog-o-tubes ;-)
I found myself with some spare time the other day and decided that my current mysql backup strategy is not the best in the world. The mysql server is a virtual machine in a Brisbane datacenter and it's backed up via a script that calls mysqldump on each installed database and dumps the content to (compressed) files. These files then get sucked down via rdiff-backup.
This is fine in principle, but does mean it's possible for me to lose 24 hours worth of data due to an accidental '--; DROP table students.
With hard disks getting larger by the month, keeping all your data backed up can be tricky. Raid will give you reliability, but no possibility of taking your data off-site, and tape drives are expensive.
I found myself needing to keep backups of an 80GB raid array for a small office server, and recalled an article I had read a few months ago in Linux Journal. The article details how you can keep snapshot backups of thumb drives on your harddisk... and that made me think doing the reverse should be workable too.