I want to back up a modest home system -- about 120GB storage, about 70GB currently in use onto a (brand new) external 300GB USB hard drive. This should be done in a systematic way so that a modest number of old (incremental ?) backups are available. There are a number of applications available to do this, in particular: amanda backuppc bacula These are all intended for backup from a client to a server. Is there any reason for the client and the server not to be the same machine? Is this overkill -- will a little script with rsync or whatever do the job? There's also dump but this seems to be intended mostly for backup to tape. Is this impression of dump correct? Thanks - jon