Towards a less thought, robust backup solution

As everyone knows, backups are critical. Unfortunately, robust backup solutions often require ongoing thought to be sustained. Apple's TimeMachine revolutionized no thought backups and it's relatively easy to use an existing ubuntu server/desktop system with free space to act as a timecapsule (see the many tutorials on the web). This allows my macbook (or any other mac for that matter) to backup to my server at home whenever I'm on the local network. Unfortunately it's not very robust, there is a single backup in a single location. It's difficult to take snapshots of this backup and copy them elsewhere because it is saved as a sparse disk image. There is simply no way to get a non-OS X system to manipulate these images (hdiutils which mounts sparse disk images isn't released back to the BSD community). TimeMachine: no thought – check; robust – not really.

CrashPlan is a service similar to services like Carbonite. They charge to store your backups on their server, but they will provide you with the infrastructure to backup to local drives, as well as remote computers. The interface is not quite as nice as TimeMachine, but so far it seems to replace most of the functionality. CrashPlan: no thought – check; robust – for money.