Hey guys-

I am finishing up setting up my LINUX workstation and have configured an external hard drive to use for full and incremental backups.

Can someone point me in the right direction on how and what to use to do the backup that would allow me a warm to hot recovery.

Thank you

For OS recovery please check Acronis True Image. For filesystem backups you can you lvm snapshots (consistent backups) and then copy/tar/dump to anywhere you want.

I was looking at Amanda - have you used this? thoughts?

No I haven't but I guess it cannot recover your OS. For OS recovery you can use clonezilla but it cannot backup your system while its running while Acronis can Backup your OS and Filesystems while your system is online but its not a free software

Amanda is awesome. But it's not necessarily the right thing for your situation. It is intended for network backup of multiple machines. You could use it if you just wanted to do it for the sake of learning new software, but otherwise you probably want to choose simpler tools.

If you assume that you will reinstall in the case of disaster, then you can just backup data using something like rsync. There are incremental snapshot methods that can be used to work efficiently with rsync. For example, http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/.

If you want backups for just data then there are lot of free tools. BackupPC is one of them. If you want backup of your complete OS then you can use clonezilla but as said it can not backup online systems. It is a Live distribution.
But your data is what should matter you the most. Even on servers, I take backups of the data. And keep log of the changes made to the configurations to the files manually. They are not hard to maintain. You can reinstall OS with not much of an effort if you know what to do and if you have backups of data. Application installation can be done via yum or apt depending on the distribution.