From a slashdot post.
1. Buy 2 identically-sized USB hard drives.
2. Write a script to backup your server onto one of them.
3. After one week, unplug the USB drive, bring it to work, and put it inside a personal cabinet.
4. Connect Drive 2 to the server. Let the script run normally on a one week rotation.
5. After one week, bring Drive 2 to work, put inside a personal cabinet. Bring Drive 1 home later that day
6. Either overwrite the original directory or slap things into a new directory. Repeat ad infinitum.
So here’s what you have. You have incremental backups onsite and weekly backups offsite. All the rsycing/sambaing is done within your personal network, so there’s no security problems (other than the normal ones). You have hard drives which could be mounted by any server with a similar operating system. In the event of fire, you’d lose at most a week of work.
The biggest problem would be archiving, but if you could fit all your data inside a 250Gig USB drive (and truthfully, that’s a helluva lot of space!), you could survive for a long time on it. 250 gig hard drives are costing about $200 these days ($400 for 2).
On another note, I recently bought a H340 iriver mp3 player/recorder because my ihp-140 was having problems (and still is). I have about 38 gigs of content on my ihp-140, and if I lost the files, it would be no big deal as long as I had a log listing of these files. (Most are creative commons archives and wouldn’t be difficult to track down).
Mike Rubel has an article about backing up with rsync and a slashdot post. (Another rsnapshot lets users restore backups without needing permission from root). Believe it or not, my current backup solution is not ideal, although when I move to a web server that will change.