Hardware for Wrath

[Concillian]

What hardware/software do you use for the "bootable backup that's updated nightly"?

I use a fileserver that uses the lowest power setup I had on hand (because it's on all the time) this was a server board with an old S939 3000+ (single core 1.8GHz). It has integrated graphics. I tested with one of those crappy Kill-a-Watt things and it says it uses 50W just sitting there, so that's not too bad to have running full time.

It runs Linux, currently Ubuntu 8.something LTS. Whatever was current when I re-did the drives a few months ago.

Attach 2nd hard drive with at least as much capacity in your favorite way (USB, SATA, PATA)

DD the first drive to the second
use rsync on a cron job every night to make incremental backups.

It takes like 30 minutes of going through man pages to find the right flags for DD and rsync and your have bootable backups for life. DD is sort of like Ghost. It makes a full bit by bit backup of a partition. This makes the second drive 100% identical to the first (and therefore bootable). rsync does differential backups so it doesn't take nearly as long as DD to do backups. The cron job runs it when I'm least likely to be using my computers (3:30 am)

I look at what's necessary to do the same thing on a Windows machine, and I just cannot possibly imagine ever doing that on a Windows machine. First you have to buy Ghost, then you have to buy some kind of software to do something the OS should be able to do by itself. These two pieces of software probably each cost as much as the drives you're backing up because they're generally for corporate use.

It should be possible in OS X too. I don't know macs at all, but it should be pretty easy to setup with OS X.