Thanks everyone, looks like rsync is the way to go, I'll have a look
through the man page when I get the chance.
Yeah, the command history is a lifesaver - a big improvement of DOS
which just saves the command while the window is open!
Cheers
Keith
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Keith Buddie <k.buddie@???>
Date: Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 8:28 PM
Subject: Backup solutions for Ubuntu
To: hampshire@???
Hello all,
 I've been on the list for a while but this is my first post so
 hopefully it will make sense!
 I'm a fairly new user of Ubuntu 7.10 and trying to migrate everything
 over from XP - so far everything is going OK but the next obstacle is
 getting everything backed up. In Windows, I used a program called
 Memeo Autobackup ( 
http://www.memeo.com/autobackup.htm ) to back
 everything up to my network hard drive; it basically scans folders you
 set for changes and when it sees a file has changed, sends it to the
 network drive.
 Admittedly, this was quite resource hungry, esp on my 5 year old
 laptop and I don't actually need immediate backups anyway.
 So, I've been playing with Flyback (
 
http://www.howtoforge.com/creating-snapshot-backups-with-flyback-ubuntu-7.10
 ) but it's not really doing what I want. Firstly, it won't see the
 network drive, but I suspect that is down to my lack of understanding
 of mounting drives etc.
 Aside from that, if I just set it to backup locally as a test it seems
 to create a whole new set of backup folders that seemingly contain all
 the files every time I press backup (presumably the same would happen
 every time the cron job runs) but all I want is a replication of the
 folder structure in my home drive with the latest version of the
 files.
 I don't want the NAS filling up with backups, nor copy Gbs of data
 over a wireless network every time a backup is run!
 But I'm probably missing something? When I google for linux backup
 applications, it seems to me that they are all designed to take a copy
 of the whole contents of the folders in question each time. What are
 people's experiences/recommendations for doing backups?
 Thanks in advance
 Keith