Before upgrading my laptop to Ubuntu 10.04, I wanted to backup my data. I found this list of backup utilities:
TechRepublic: 10 outstanding Linux backup utilities
I chose to install sbackup, but it didn’t work so hot for me. It kicked off the process to start backing up, and I liked the interface the way I could choose what I wanted backed up. But, what I didn’t like is that the process ran in the background, and I couldn’t see any status of the backup or confirm that it was running. I thought for sure that I chose the destination as my external drive, but it began backing up to /var/backup instead, and it filled up my drive.
Once I found and deleted that backup, I ended up just using a GUI front-end to rsync. I think it was the grsync one. If you do a search for “rsync” in synaptic, you will see a number of options.