Don't know how best to answer your question.
At the minute I am using
AMANDA
It's free, very stable and reliable, is command line only, very customizable however not for the newbie. It can also be used to copy backups to CD/DVD.
There is also
ARKEIA
There's not much I can tell you about it except that it's not free, it has both a CLI and a GUI, you can use it for free only for personal use and no more than 3 machines. I think.
However I've never used it so can't vouch for it's reliability.
You probably already know this, but whatever solution you go with you will need to bear in mind that it will be best to use tar. I don't want to start a DUMP `v` TAR holy war so I suggest ready a post made by someone by the name of
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
I assume he knows what he's talking about.
As for AMANDA
Have a read of these
Using AMANDA for High Performance Backups
Frankenlinux
The first is about as indepth as you want to get when starting out the second will get you started and give you something to mess around with while you get familier and make a few valuable mistakes.
You haven't mentioned what sort of backup media.
I saw a DLT4000 (20Gb native 40Gb compressed) going on ebay for £40 (Although tapes are usually around £45 a pop)
On Scan I say a ditto tape drive going for £40 however tapes again are almost as expensive but it was also parallel not scsi.
There's no reason why you can't write some script to just periodically use tar, gzip and samba to create backups of your systems, I just like using amanda because it'll tell me if it's detected a problem before the backup commenses and if I want to extract a specific file for a specific date for a specific host I can without too much effort via it's CLI.
Basically I'm backing up 5 machines over the network with amanda. If my tape breaks then no big deal as the backups are stored on a holding disk then I just pop in a tape and flush it to tape. Also the other advantage of the holding disk is that your not waiting for the tape to be ready it simply gets it all off of the machines onto the disk and when they're there pops em onto tape.
But like I say this depends on what you want to backup and how sophisticated you want it, a couple of gigs a week from a couple of machines you may decide just to have a script do it (you can get 80-100Gb harddrives for £100+vat nowadays so lot's of storage out there)
