linsys - 3:33 am on Aug 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

Sorry, but don't ever use some commercial windows program to do your linux jobs for you. Linux has great tools built in to handle that, since you have a temporary solution I'll give you some tools to look into and a brief explanation on what they do and what the difference is.

rsync: I would not use this program, its primarily for network use like if you want to sync a directory to another system its insecure and slow.

dump: this is a great tool for backing up filesystems from disk to disk or disk to tape. I would say a great choice for backups.

dd: dd is one of the best tools for cloning a hard drive, it is a bit by bit hard drive clone tool. So lets say you have a 250g drive you would need another 250g drive so you can clone the primary 250g drive. If drive one fails all you need to do is move drive 2 (the DD clone) into drive one's position, then boot the system. Boom your backup!

cpio: This is like a "tar" but is better for backups IMO. It supports network backups so you can backup one system to another.

tar: Well tar is great and supports network backups as well.

I would never backup data over an insecure connection, look into how to tunnel tar and cpio over ssh its quite easy.

These are the low level tools available for free, but there are some great free backup tools as well, specifically Amanda (look it up on freshmeat.net).