For years, I've used Retrospect for backup on the Mac and love it's simplicity and stability. I've needed to do complete restores a couple of times and it worked flawlessly. About a year ago I moved to Linux FC-3 and would like to implement a backup strategy capable of doing a "bare metal" restore. I've checked out rsnapshot, mkCDrec, and mondo rescue. Anyone have experience with these or other backup programs? I have a dvd recorder on this machine and could do backups there or to an external HD. Any opinions on this?

Thanks,
Ron

Personally I don't have experience with any of the backup programs you mention. Instead I wrote my own backup scripts in BASH and installed them in crontab to do all my backups. It really wasn't all that bad to do and I get incrementals, differentials and fulls all migrated to different places for safekeeping. If you want some really good advice on what to backup and how often, you may want to get a copy of the "Linux Troubleshooting Bible" by Negus and Weeks which really has a good chapter on backups from a sys admin point of view as well. It's tailored to Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise, but it reads generic enough for any distro(I run SuSE 10.0). Hope this helps. All the best...

PERFECT Linux/*nix backup programs:

tar
dar

That is all you need. Use gzip or bzip2 to compress the archives.

Well said! Love tar...

I'm actually partial to dar over tar because:

1. It's more flexible
2. Allows automated media spanning and file splitting
3. Is recoverable even if partially corrupt
4. did I mention it's more flexible?