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I just got thrown into ubuntu administration and I was wondering whats the best way to set daily backups of the entire drive to another local drive? Would rsync and crontabs work? If so how would I go about this?

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I recommend you use rsnapshot. It uses rsync and hard links to make snapshot backups on a configurable schedule. You can have for example three hourly backups, three daily backups, and three weeky backups. The key point is that because rsnapshot uses hard links, the only extra space taken beyond the first backup is for changed files.

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Forgive my noobishness but how do you set the destination path for the backups to a different drive. i know you can do it on the same drive just by putting the path. –  nick brochu Apr 20 '11 at 17:27
linux just has one directory tree that you attach drives to. So in my setup, I mount the second drive as /misc/backup and tell rsnapshot to put all the snapshots under that directory. –  Phil Hollenback Apr 20 '11 at 17:46
Thanks for the help man. –  nick brochu Apr 20 '11 at 18:44
so basically, linux will see that drive as a folder in the directory. –  nick brochu Apr 20 '11 at 18:45
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Yes, the most likely solution would be to have a cron job run at a certain time that runs an rsync contrived to catch all the useful stuff from your source to your backup destination. The -a flag is likely to come in handy here since it predefined a bunch of options targeted at archiving.

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