This is a rather broad question, and I apologize for that, but I'm wondering what kind of backup strategies people have implemented for linux and how effective they've been? I'm looking for something that could be done for a network of ~25-30 hosts, all running linux. I'd like to do incrementals nightly and a full weekly. I've read a lot about custom scripts that use some variation of rsync, tar and even cp, but I'm wondering if there's a decent (open-source) solution that's out there that anyone has had some success with. Many thanks.

Most people do just role their own scripts for what your doing. In fact at work with the Windows Servers, I'm actually implementing a simple scripting system using rar, as Veritas Backup Exec just doesn't cut it when your dealing with large sets of small files. Theres about 60Gb of ~20k documents ( or about 3 Million ).

The only ones I can think of are all commercial. Its just so easy to write something with tar and bash. Their are a few OS ones but they don't really have the capabilities you want.

Just though you'd like to know about this The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. Might be what you need but it ain't the easiest to setup.