All,

I posted in here simply because I could not decide what the smartest way to back up my information is. I was hoping you guys could help me. Thanks in advance!

Distribution: Slackware 12.2
Local drive: 80GB IDE
Physically: hda1 (Linux LVM)
Logically: myvg {root (6GB ReiserFS) swap (2GB) home (62GB ReiserFS)}
Unallocated LVM space: 6GB

External USB drive: 500GB LaCie USB 2.0 external-powered
Physically: sda1 (32GB NTFS) sda2 (435GB Linux LVM)
Logically: LACIE-NTFS (32GB sda1 NTFS), mydata (no LVs)
Unallocated LVM space: 434 GB

Goal: back up /dev/myvg/home
Focus: ease of use, stability, availability, currency (i.e. as up to date as possible), ease of restoration of /home in an emergency.
Gotchas:
- External USB device isn't always connected
- A huge leap in CPU and disk usage when first plugged in would be bad
- Partition sda1 needs to be available for use in other OSes
Special needs:
- I'm a clutz
- I'm paranoid
- I'm new to LVM

I hope this makes sense. In the past I used rsync as a nightly cron job, and my script checked to see if the drive existed before attempting a backup. Anyways, what's the most elegant (i.e. best results with least amount of work, least amount of complexity) solution for me? Please chime in. Thanks!

IMHO rsync is the only way to go. rsync only changes what is different...so you're not always performing a full backup.

Post your script and maybe we can help.

Nah I'm good to go in terms of my rsync script, i was just asking if maybe there is a better way (tm).