[Dale L Roblin]

I would like some advice on what would be considered as a "bullet-proof" backup system.

There is no such thing. :-) At one place I work, even if more expensive than tapes, we use a few external USB disk units, encrypted for security, and simply `rsync' to them, accross the network, from all our main hierarchies on various machines. We do not try to backup things installed out of CDs, the CDs are the backups. We carefully document configuration of each machine, which is something useful in itself. We chose to not backup our biggest databases, but rather keep them on a big, fast (and expensive) RAID file server, with UPSes and al. Yet I'm not sure I like that solution :-). When we add a new such an external disk unit in the circuit, we initialise it with a copy of another. Using initialised disks, `rsync' takes only a few minutes every day (even if it take a few days before a particular disk unit returns), and the backups are always guaranteed to be full. Very convenient. Restoring is also fairly easy, given the backups are indeed mountable disks, using similar hierarchies. Once `rsync' installed on all machines and `ssh' keys exchanged, the overall backup operations are controlled through a single Python script, accepting arguments for the common operations we need. P.S. - A former boss used to say that there are two kinds of computer people: those who lost data, and those who are going to lose data! -- François Pinard http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca