I do local backups on several of my machines using rsync. I have an extra disk installed that can hold all the contents of the main disk. I then have a nightly cron job that backs up the main disk to the backup. This is the script I use on one of those machines. #!/bin/sh export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin LIST="rootfs usr data data2" for d in $LIST; do mount /backup/$d rsync -ax --exclude fstab --delete /$d/ /backup/$d/ umount /backup/$d done DAY=`date "+%A"` rsync -a --delete /usr/local/apache /data2/backups/$DAY rsync -a --delete /data/solid /data2/backups/$DAY The first part does the backup on the spare disk. The second part backs up the critical parts to daily directories. I also backup the critical parts using a rsync over ssh to a remote machine.