rsync is great for lots of small files and you can hard link to get the incremental backups (it's what I use so let me know if you want my script and I'll post the current source online), but for huge (2GB) files, I might look into rdiff-backup since it only stores the differences instead of both files as rsync and hard linking would do. The downside to using rdiff-backup is that the increments are stored as diff files and so are not fully browseable. So far, there is no free software I know of that lets you have your cake and eat it too. Oh, and cron is the best for regular scheduling if you always have the external drive on and connected, otherwise you just need to remember. -Scott <div>On 4/17/07, Karl-Heinz Schulz <<a href="mailto:karlheinz@khschulz.com">karlheinz@khschulz.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I use rsync and cron rsync -avu /var /backup --report /etc/cron.daily -----Original Message----- From: <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-users-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:ubuntu-users-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-users-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com</a>] On Behalf Of Ed Smits Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 10:36 PM To: Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions Subject: Archiving/backup tool I have a 20 GB home directory that I'd like to back up to my external USB drive, and then do incremental backups once a week or so there-after. What is the suggested best way to do this? Besides the normal files there are also 8 2GB VMWare virtual disk files in the mix. I tried to create a tarball out of it, it errored out on the size. Thanks ED </blockquote></div>