rdiff-backup is awesome. It's a POSIX backup tool providing a (possibly remote) mirror and an incremental difference history (should that be decremental history?) of the mirror.

BackupNinja (website currently down) is even better. It's a curses (ie text based) wizard for setting up a number of backup tools including rdiff-backup and mysqldump. It does all the fiddly bits like handling ssh keys and setting up cron jobs.

I'm (failing miserably at) supporting someone who had decided to move from Ubuntu to Windows Vista, (on the grounds that I won't be the only person she knows who can fix her PC) and I'm investigating backup tools. I've not lived with important data on my windows partition in a while now (well apart from my Oblivion saves) and I think the last time I successfully restored a backup I made with windows was in the days when a box of 3.5inch floppies contained everything I could afford to keep backups of. But then I'm careful, lucky enough not to have had a catastrophic disk failure of a disk that was storing my user data, and well practised at the live-cd method of rescuing data.

I ask google about 'backup'. The Backup is a first page hit. Maybe google can read minds and can tell I'm considering acts of violence against those responsible for DLL-hell. And yes I've it it with Vista.

There's a lot of managed services available from US companies and a 'consensus' price of about $5 for a large (50-200Gb) working set and some kind of history of it. A few companies offer a small (>2Gb) service for home users, which is of a size where users are going to have to be very careful not to hit the limits. Excellent for getting hooked. I-Drive looks promising, apart from a clause in it's AUP that says

So if a user gets a virus and needs to restore missing data, they can't because their service was terminated?

UK based products aren't as good. BT will give you 50Gb for £5/month and appears to the the best deal I can find with a UK presence and doesn't seem to claim any intelligence in its software. I can't find a single UK service that is in anyway competitive with the US services both in terms of advertised features or price. There are loads of companies trying to sell this B2B but I guess things like proper backups don't happen to the UK home user. So it's a question of being happy with a US based company and the associated legal quagmire, or take an overpriced second rate service.

Or DIY. There's a big lack of non-expert-friendly Free Software for Windows, and backup solutions are no exception. There's a thriving market of backup tools. Symantec, a pet hate of mine, appear to rule the roost here. Their £60 solution (Sym) gives you 2Gb fo free storage. How nice of them. I suppose I'd better start looking. Of course if you have had a particularly good or bad experience with some backup software for the dreaded windowze, let me know.

UpdateBuddyBackup looks promising, but is very sketchy on the details. Will post if they reply to my questions. Am also investigating bullguard.

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• This post has absolutely nothing to do with that nu-metal band other than my broken sense of humour and lack of a better title.
• I have been adversely affected by watching Chuck, hence the proliferation of the word awesome.
• That band are not awesome....
• ...as is my habit of writing too many footnotes.