Backup Question

Saturday October 15, 2005
I would really like to have some backups of my home network.

I am currently concerned with this set of machines:

legion: My personal desktop. Running Ubuntu Breezy / Windows XP Pro. 150G linux partition, 150G windows.

kazekage: My old desktop, an ad-hoc "media center" PC that's hooked up to the TV; also serves as experimental / shared server / guest computer. 100G linux partition. Hoary right now, probably upgraded to Breezy soon. 60G XP partition that will hardly ever be used.

atuin: One of these things. Technically it runs some kind of linux, but it's a hermetically sealed box as far as I'm concerned. It's a 1T disk over SMB (samba, but no CIFS/UNIX extensions).

zelda: Print server. MacOS X (Jaguar). Runs VNC; headless. 40G HFS+ drive.

trogdor: laptop. dual boot Ubuntu Breezy / XP home. 60G linux partition, 20G windows.

There are a few other machines which may or may not be interesting to back up comprising about 200G more, all in linux.

The medium I will be backing up to is DVD-Rs, which I can get at $0.08/G - that would make the full price of one backup (with all disks full) $153.19.

I am looking for a backup system that will allow me to make this sort of backup with easy, selective restoration. Ideal would be a system where each individual DVD would contain an ISO filesystem with the actual files being backed up stored directly there, and some kind of directory-tree based index where I could make labels that would allow me to find a file. If anything in my TB drive blows, I am not going to want to buy a new one with the same capacity and then spend 6 days swapping DVDs trying to find the one file I need.

I don't mind if it's proprietary software, as long as it's reasonably priced, but I despair of finding anything that isn't open-source, since this amount of data sounds like an "enterprise" problem, and I am definitely not going to pay "enterprise" prices to back up my MP3s.