After listening to the discussion spawned by Ciemon’s rSync woes it struck me that you missed a great backup option that might be suitable for those that want off site backup, but don’t run their own VPS / server boxes and don’t want the hassle of learning rSync.

My suggestion : Amazon S3 and Jungledisk.

Pro’s:
– Data can be fully encrypted (using a private key, known only to you, which is done transparently by Jungledisk)
– Mounted drive via Fuse for easy drag and drop.
– Linux / Mac / Windows support for those that want cross platform compatibility.
– Jungledisk can provide a mounted volume on all three platforms that can just be dragged and dropped to.
– Offsite backup
– Jungledisk has a great easy to use GUI which allows a plethora of options including incremental backups / version tracking.
– Jungledisk also ships with a daemon for those that want easy offsite backup added to a server box (and can just be used as the front end to S3 and the fuse volume can be rSynced to).
– Not free (Jungle disk is $20 and S3 is $0.15 per Gb) but very very inexpensive, even for large amounts of data (I have around 50Gb up on S3 and the cost is around £5 per month)

Cons:
– The first backup can take a while depending on the amount of data you are pushing and your upstream bandwidth (rsync diffs to the fuse volume will improve this).
– Not free (but inexpensive)
– Jungledisk is not open source (to my knowledge – although they do provide demo code under the GPL for the S3 interface) for those purists who want to be completely free.

In my opinion this is a great way of providing a easy configurable, secure, multi platform stand alone backup or a simple bolt on to a server box to add off site backup. My backup solution:
– Server box running hardy server on RAID 5
– all my machines rsync to the server box over ssh tunnel.
– subversion on server box for version control
– server box runs jungledisk to provide a fuse volume, which is rsynced to once a day + a bash script to provide version history on a per file extension basis.

Just my two cents (I promise I don’t work for Jungledisk(!), but I have had nothing but a great experience with the software),

Keep up the good work on the podcast

Best,

Adam

Jungledisk : http://www.jungledisk.com
S3: http://www.amazon.com/s3