Is there a recommended backup program that would back up everything, then my changed files to my external HD, preferably automatically after the change or when shutting down, but manually would be OK too? Looks like my KEEP is not the one...
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Re: Backup Recommendation?
I find a simple brute-force method fits my requirements. At work I use an external USB hard drive (60GB or so) and simply copy my entire user directory (/home/username) to it weekly or even daily. Each subsequent backup overwrites the previous one. Depending on the amount of information to be transferred (of course) the whole process takes 10 minutes or so. A few files (symbolic links to other files I believe) cannot be transferred this way, but when using Konqueror to make the transfer you are given the single-click option to "auto skip" these files. (By contrast Nautilus in my experience asks for every single file to be skipped and so is not workable for this process.)
At home I have many more files (photographs and music files in particular), so I use a modified procedure: the "photos" and "music" directories are excluded from the backup procedure, and instead are backed-up with their own separate routines (to CDs and DVDs). All the rest is backed-up with the procedure I describe here.
This procedure works well for protecting me from a catastrophic failure. It is also very convenient when upgrading to a new distribution (just wipe out the old one, install from scratch, and then re-add selected user files), and when travelling (I just take the external USB hard drive with me, with all my user files). It does NOT work for long-term storage of important information; transfer to CDs or DVDs is still the solution for that task.
An advantage of this approach is that you can pick and choose among all your backed-up files, as they are not combined into a single tarball. It is as simple as finding the file or directory you want and copying it back to your main drive.
One issue I had was with backing-up email messages in Kmail. When using the "maildir" format for my messages (each message stored as a separate file) I found most would not transfer to the external hard drive; apparently something to do with encryption, but I could never figure it out. Since then I switched to "mbox" format (all messages in a single file, as used by most email programs) and have had no further problems with back-ups.
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