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Well, if you choose to backup on OS X native, which your post doesn't state since rsync is on OS X as well, there's BRU Producer's Edition. Time Machine can be a bit resource hungry in my experience, so that may not be the best option for you. On the Linux front, there are a few tools to do the trick. Again, TOLIS Group has BRU Server for Linux native, but that's a higher price than BRU PE is going to be. However, if you're looking for a free product, rsync may not cut it due to the limitations that many others have already mentioned. There's MondoRescue, but again, I don't think that will work to the needs that you require. Though the user 'mlheur' hit the nail on the head in my opinion. You need to focus on your restore needs and then choose a backup application that fits those needs!

http://www.mondorescue.org/

The only way I know of to downgrade is to make a complete system backup with a tool like "Mondo Rescue" before attempting an upgrade. Should the upgrade fail, you restore the backup you made.

Mondo Rescue might suit your needs. Linux based, it will make a rescue disk, if you like, and will backup your NTFS partition.

Al

I know that Mondo Rescue supports spanning over discs of any size. It also supports differential backups. I personally use it for nightly backups. Setup is simple via command line switches, and restoring is done via a curses-based tool on the bootable iso. http://mondorescue.org/about.shtml

Mondo is a extremely impressive product. It does what you want. If you don't like Ghost images, use Mondo Rescue. If you wanna do filesystem-based incremental backups, use BackupPC. Stupid name, but truly enterprise-ready(tm).

You are right about the fact that you have a reasonable network backup possibilities if you care enough. I managed to setup an automatic backup of all of my machines at work using http://www.amanda.org/.

But my home workstation is another story. I don't pay for any dedicated backup server so I end with making backups on DVDs. I can easily backup some stuff that is well organized but the rest is a bit problematic ;).
And what if your system died for some reason? Will you be able to recover it? What if it stopped booting?

Actually, there is a good system for it (at least from my perspective) -- http://www.mondorescue.org/ but I had problems to set it up correctly on Ubuntu. I'd really appreciate something with similar capabilities but tailored (and granted to work) for Ubuntu... possibly even with a graphical interface which would allow to easily define included and excluded regions to backup.

Besides that -- simple ubuntu-native backup would be clearly beneficial for less skilled users. I guess they now solve the problem by not doing any backups at all ;). Maybe some of them use k3b to occasionaly burn some of their most important documents.

Bacula it's the same, but it has a GUI and cataloging. Still testing it.

The typical larger IT department has to deal with things like corporate software policies, locking user account profiles, automated application and operating system patches/updates and remote helpdesk. How can I enforce the corporate software policy against instant messengers when every distro except debian bundles all the stock KDE applications (including instant messenger apps) in a few giant RPMs? KDE 3.2 will be doing more profile locking features, but what about applications that don't use the KDE libs? What about Gnome?

1. Dont give your users root on their desktop machines, and they can't install packages. Additionally you can make gcc non-executable to non-root users.
2. Use a central authentication source, such as LDAP.
3. Use a better distro
4. Use ssh for remote administration, or if you need a GUI, a remote X client.

A specific suggestion: Gentoo. If you really think you might need to rebuild your apps to add your own patches and such, Gentoo arguably has the best build system, and you can configure your clients to only install binary packages from a central server. Then your client machines don't have to actually build anything.

The downside on Gentoo is that it does not have an automated installer, which can be a real pain if you have a lot of machines to install. The solution is fairly simple: Build one client, and then use Mondo to build a self-installing CD (it's a one-liner). Burn the resulting ISO(s) (depending on how much you install), put them in a new machine, boot, let it self-install, reboot, and you're done. You don't have to use Gentoo for this, of course.

Supporting desktop clients is not going to be a no-brainer with any OS, but it is doable with Linux and existing tools.

I recently was looking around for backup solutions. The folks over at ltsp (ltsp) recomended mondo/mindi for a backup solution. Mindi is a linux system duplicator, however they seemed to have made a bootable Mindi CD with memtest86 allong with a few other utilities that seem quite comprehensive. Check it out here. ( mindi.iso) )

How about a Linux solution? Mondo

The two problems are fast-changing directories (e.g. /home) and rootkits that trojans that are present when creating the backup.

Those are solved by:
1) As part of the install, create a system image, excluding the fast-changing directories (e.g. /home, /var/www) after the site-specific configuration changes have been made.
2) Make backups of the fast-changing directories at regular intervals.

tar is not the only utility for backups and imaging. (Tape ARchive was originally not for backups and imaging; even the GNU-on-steroids tar poorly handles simple errors in the archive by terminating restore.)
You have dump/restore (though still broken on Linux?), dd, amanda (runs on several UNIX and GNU/Linux flavors), Mondo Rescue (the Linux-specific, practically automated drive imager), and g4u (dd dressed up in pretty scripts). (The Mondo Rescue also has a compare facility to check system integrity from the image CD.)

I recommend Mondo Rescue for backing up linux boxes. Its fully GPL, supports backing up LVM, RAID, ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, VFAT files systems to tape, CD-R, CD-RW or NFS and you can restore from bare metal just like ghost.