• A desktop or laptop of any kind
• A linux server

Applications used

• Backuppc on the linux server (there’s a package for it on most distributions)
• DeltaCopy on Windows XP (you can use rsync directly on Mac and Linux desktops)

Basically, install both, and configure to taste. Consult the documentation on both sites.

However, there are some tricks that made life easier. For example, you might want to configure DeltaCopy to be the rsync server on the Windows computer. If you use Mac or Linux, you can do it any way you like. I found making DeltaCopy the rsync server on Windows to be easiest. This way, you can use the ‘rsyncd’ option in backuppc to “pull” files from “shares” you create using DeltaCopy. The other way around didn’t seem to work as smoothly as I’d liked.

By default, backuppc “wakes up” every hour, on the hour, and looks for changes on it’s hosts. Making this faster definitely makes it easier to catch a laptop user online for a backup. The real beauty of backuppc is that it works similarly to rsync (even moreso when it’s using rsync). Incremental backups save large amounts of space.

Cool, I won’t hop out of the ship to touch the sign now. Thanks.

(Thanks to Jeff for the screenshot)

Aren’t you all glad errors like this are much less common? Oh, and notice you DON’T have any option other than rebooting the computer. Wait a second, that sounds like installing “updates” on Windows….