I use rsync, or unison, for both offsite and onsite backups, (I even have a great python script written by Andrew for doing incremental backups nicely, which I HIGHLY recommend everyone here get a copy of, it's way cool). But this is beyond the abilities of "normal" people, and I have never tried to teach my father to use this.
For "normal" people, I assume you mean those who will be running windows. For them, I set up a simple linux server to back up to, and hand them winscp, which will run on Windows, and happily copy or more importantly sync with the linux system over ssh. Thus I set up the dynamic dns, ssh and all the rest, and they just have to learn to use winscp. That is how I set up off-site backups for people like my father. For local system backups, unison or rsync is great on linux, and when in windows I still use those same tools under cygwin, but that is beyond the capabilities of the "normal" users I believe that you are referring to, so I point them at toucan over in portable apps. That seems to work well for them to sync to their external hard drives plugged into their local computers. http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/toucan It will also let them backup to a zip file etc. does a nice job, is open source, and free, easy enough for a non-pro to use, and even has some nice encryption support if you need it. To summarize: winscp for remote backups, toucan for local backups. James -- "And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun..." (Mark 16:2) Web: http://james.jlcarroll.net
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