Over the past few months I've been gradually putting together a Linux-based backup system for me and Annie's mac laptops. Things I wanted, from most important to least:

• Complete automation over wifi; any manual steps (including plugging a cable in) would just get forgotten or put off.
• Backups had to fit on my modded Xbox's 250GB disk
• Backups of the entire OS and all applications
• Snapshots, so I could see what my files looked like yesterday, two weeks ago or last month
• Easy access to the backed up data
• A way to re-export backed up music to iTunes

After much head-scratching, a lot of procrastination and a few wrong turns, I've got pretty much all of those things. Not quite all... but most.

It's way cool!

The music collection needs some work; it has quite a few duplicate albums in it. One of these days I'll write some code to fix that, but it's not terribly urgent. Aside from that, the system works really well.

For all the geeks out there, I've written a rough "howto" explaining how it all works.

...

Until I got this working, I had been thinking about buying Leopard and trying Apple's Time Machine backup system.

It sounds really cool; making backups sexy is no small achievement! But now that I've got my own up and running, I'm much less interested. Mine will still work when (if?) I decide to switch back to a Linux laptop, and I rather suspect my music sharing shenanigans aren't something Apple's systems will match.