Hrm. Strike the comment about all 5 star reviews... Amazon reviews are all over the place (with mostly 1 stars...) I'm going to read through them to discard the chaff and see what the real problems are.

Apparently it's their Enterprise level that's awesome... home, not as much... I'll keep looking

He came back and recommended Ghost or Amanda... I'm looking hard at amanda now...

If you don't want to discuss here... head over to my VERY FIRST EVER REDDIT POST at http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/rhyc2/back_me_up_here/

LOL PC

2 people on Reddit (where I have NO upvotes, thank you very much) recommended CrashPlan, which looks to be free if I do it solely locally, but have to pay if I want to do offsite backup (which I don't right now, but I might someday, so i should remember this)

I've used both, and they both work (Amanada/CrashPlan). I actually used Zmanda Cloud Backup for awhile too, it was my fave, pushed out to AmazonS3

ok, well, that settles it... Amanda gets the most votes... ? hehehe

I've heard good things about Amanda and Zmanda. I, however, am a firm believer in manual backups and fear the idea of set-it-and-forget-it systems for personal use. I use dropbox for my uber critical stuff and external drive for my manual stuff. At this time if my computer died, I'd be sad but would be able to recover all of my important things.

Does it matter that all the computers now have Windows 7?

newp... or it won't if i ever plug in the HDD and implement this