I'm just a mortal developer so I don't have to admin anything serious, but here's how I do backups of my personal files & server. Mainly using Git: Any code /

I'm just a mortal developer so I don't have to admin anything serious, but here's how I do backups of my personal files & server. Mainly using Git: Any code / changes to Debian's default /etc setup go into Git and are at least on both the relevant machine (laptop or server) and GitHub. See http://github.com/avar http://github.com/avar and http://github.com/avar/linode-etc http://github.com/avar/linode-etc for the /etc on the server. I keep some personal data (like finance notes) in GPG encrypted files in private Git repositories. E-Mail is backed up my Google's GMail (presumably) and data like my small collection of music is something I can always get back from the Internet. If the filesystem on my laptop, server or GitHub is destroyed right now I can get everything working again relatively quickly just by installing Ubuntu or Debian from scratch and copying my home directory, /etc and code from Git on one of the remaining machines. I've made a script that automatically backs up my Git repositories daily (http://github.com/avar/github-backup http://github.com/avar/github-backup), the resulting backup is around 180MB. Losing some of my other data would be an annoyance but this is all I /really/ care about. Follow somebody else's advice if you need "real" backups, but for my simple needs this suffices.