Backing up stuff

Question

Whats a good way to back things up?  I want to cp certain files to another computer so that incase I screw something up I can recover quickly.  While I'm at it I'd like to backup mail and other things too.  Is that something I'd use cron for?  Sounds like that's what rsync does to.
Don't need any indepth respond, just general direction.
Thanks

Answer 1

I made myself a bash script that copies set folders to my external drive every night at 9pm - why then? cause my computer is always on
#! /bin/bash
backupdir=`grep -c backup /etc/mtab`
if [ $backupdir==1 ]; then
echo `date +%d/%m/%Y - %k:%M` : Starting backup >> /home/iphitus/.backup/log
backupdate=/mnt/backup/`date +%d.%m.%Y`
mkdir $backupdate
for directory in `cat /home/iphitus/.backup/dirs`
do
echo `date +%d/%m/%Y - %k:%M` : Copying Directory: $directory >> /home/iphitus/.backup/log
cp -a $directory $backupdate
echo `date +%d/%m/%Y - %k:%M` : $directory Complete. >> /home/iphitus/.backup/log
done
echo `date +%d/%m/%Y - %k:%M` : Backup Complete >> /home/iphitus/.backup/log
rm -r /mnt/backup/backup
mkdir /mnt/backup/backup
cp /home/iphitus/.backup/* /mnt/backup/backup/
fi
if [ $backupdir==0 ]; then
echo `date +%d/%m/%Y - %k:%M` : Backup failed: Partition Not mounted. >> /home/iphitus/.backup/log
fi
config file:
/home/iphitus/Documents/Documents/
/home/iphitus/pycast
/home/iphitus/Graphics
/home/iphitus/serverb
How it works?
checks if partition is mounted, then copies the stuff listed in the config file ~/.backup/dirs to the set place. yeah i know it sucks, but it works and maybe it'll work for whoever else uses it.