Destroying "only" your home directory (was Re: Newbie question on permissions)

[Antony Gelberg]

Michael T. Richter wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-04 at 10:47 +0700, Chanchao wrote:
> 
>>Well.. How about open your home folder in Nautilus, go up one folder
>>into home, right-click on your home folder and go 'Archive', then create
>>the archive file on an external USB drive?
>>
> 
> That would be the typical UNIX way to make "backups", yes.
> 
> Where does that leave file versioning?  Incremental (or differential)
> backups?  Selective backups?  (I have stuff in my home folder that I
> wouldn't mind too terribly much losing that sucks up a lot of space.) 
> System configurations (for those "power users" that might want to handle
> that situation as well)?
> 
> A good backup application handles all of that in a format that's easy to
> access.
> 

You might want to take a look at rsnapshot.