I was recently in a position where I needed a backup solution that was flexible enough to handle my laptop as well as my home server. I back up to a couple of older USB drives; A 1.5T for my laptop, and a 750G for my home server. The plethora of options out there is daunting, and the most obvious like rsync (which I really like and use often) are very nice. But I wanted something that I could set up quickly and would meet a couple of other needs easily.

• I wanted it to conform to a standard backup scheme where there are a couple backups each day, a daily backup for a week or so, a monthly backup, and a yearly.
• I wanted it to delete outdated backups
• I wanted it to be tolerant of the backup drive not being available, such as when I am out of town with my laptop, but don't have the USB drive to back up to.
• and ... I also wanted it to do something like rsync in that it stores only the differences, not an entire copy of everything in each backup.

What I found was a Perl application called storeBackup. It has been around for a while, claims to be production ready/stable, and it seems to me as if it is.

I did a non-exhaustive search here on perlmonks and did not find a reference to this handy tool, so thought I would mention it here in meditations....as I was sitting here meditating about it. The darn thing works really well! It does exactly what I want it to do in that it meets all the requirements listed above, and has the added benefit that it is written in Perl.

For anyone looking for a very sweet backup solution that is simple to set up, is tolerant of a dynamic environment, and provides efficient, accessible, and easily recoverable backup data, I would certainly recommend looking at this solution. From my perspective, it just plain rocks!