I am relatively new to Linux, using both OpenSUSE and Mandriva with KDE 4.2.
I am looking for a good backup solution. I've used Mac for a couple years and with Mac have used a program called SuperDuper with an external USB Hard Drive.
With SuperDuper it would initially do a complete mirror of the hard drive. With each successive backup it would update the external hard drive but it is always a mirrored drive so if my internal hard drive crashed I'd instantly be able to boot from the external hard drive.
Is there something like this available for Linux? What backup program should I look for? Any suggestions of a good brand of external hard drive to get?

You could look through the bookmarks here http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup, but it sounds like you want something like rsync together with an imaging program. I'm sure someone will chime in with some details there. What rsync would miss is the initial setup of partitions and the installation of boot blocks. That's what the imaging program would fill in.

Hello,

You might want to check out this thread here on LinuxQuestions. Some links in there will point to what you need in my opinion.

Kind regards,

Eric

DD
rsync
backula

for starts.