I dual boot Linux (Fedora and LinuxMint) with Windows XP Professional on several machines at home. I have previously used Acronis TrueImage Home booted from a UBCD4WIN cd, to backup (either full or incremental), windows partitions and/or folders. It also allowed access to the archive image file to restore specific files and folders if required. This was very convenient and reliable. However it doesn't offer the same options for linux partitions or directories/folders.

Is there a single GUI based backup solution that will allow me to backup not only partitions, but also specific folders also with an incremental backup option for Linux AND XP? I am aware of (and sometimes use) linux boot cd's for partition imaging, dd command and partimage, but the latter does not allow for individual file restoration. But these solutions are not intuitive for me, and definitely unusable for other members of my household when compared to the better GUI offerings for Windows.

Any solutions would be greatly appreciated.

acronis latest offers
Supported File Systems:

* FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP;

Use rsync command line. It's very flexible and works great.

I know of rsync, although have never used it, but was hoping to get away from the command line if possible
(otherwise I become the sole system administrator in our house!). Also I wanted something equivalent
cross platform ie the same backup functions on BOTH platforms with a GUI and if possible open source.

My understanding is that Acronis will image a linux partition from the standalone boot version and can then extract individual files (maybe) from the full image. I was hoping for someing more granular than that in file selction for backup.

Thank you for the suggestions. Any others?

It's up to you but avoiding the command line cuts you off from a lot of really good tools and makes you dependent on things you might not always have access to. What if you have to log in under SSH to your machine from a remote location? If you learn command line you can accomplish anything you want.

Also, why pay money for apps that can break when you can use good, open-source apps with community support?

rsync is really nice and I use it to make hourly incremental backups of my system. If my main system fails I can bring up a mirror image Linux from a different drive.

Just some thoughts.